Coming Home
by Chasmfiend
Summary: When Sirius Black is released from Azkaban, he finds himself facing a dilemma. Spend months trapped in St. Mungo's until the Healers are sure he's ready to take care of himself, or go to live with his grandfather.
1. An Offer You Can't Refuse

Sirius had thought, when the new Minister had declared him 'cleared of all charges', that he would be let lose to find his way back to his apartment and sort out his life on his own, although he thought it likely that the Weasleys would help him. It turned out that the Ministry wasn't that cruel... or that kind.

No, as someone just released after spending more than six months of Azkaban Sirius was required to submit to a mental evaluation at St. Mungo's to determine whether or not he was fit to rejoin society. The answer had been a resounding 'no'. When Sirius had insisted that he was perfectly capable of taking care of himself, one of the healers had taken it as a sign that he needed to be restrained.

For a place dedicated to caring for the sick, St. Mungo's had an awful lot of similarities to Azkaban. Sirius was locked in a small, windowless room – it was roughly twice the size of his old cell, if Sirius had had the energy to pace – with nothing to do and no human companionship. To make matters worse, the Healers were prone to showing up at odd hours and Sirius didn't dare settle his nerves by spending time as Padfoot. The last thing he needed was to get thrown back in Azkaban for being an unregistered Animagus.

Because, dreadfully boring as it was, there were no dementors at St. Mungo's. The food was probably better than Azkaban's too, and Healer Shacklebolt had offered to bring him some books when she finished her shift.

Sirius really should have tried to sleep for a bit. Sleeping would probably make him feel better and when he woke up Healer Shacklebolt might have left the books. Or supper. Or Remus might have come to visit him. The Healers had asked him if he wanted them to contact anyone and he had said Remus and they had said that they'd send him a letter.

The letter should have reached Remus already. Sirius's sense of time was still a little bit off, but he very sure that he had been here for _at least_ ten hours and that was plenty of time for an owl to send a letter wasn't it?

"Oh, no it's standard policy," a voice said from somewhere outside Sirius's room. Sirius thought it belonged to Healer Shacklebolt, but the echoes threw him off a bit. "The hospital isn't really a very good place to treat prolonged demetor exposure, especially for someone who doesn't want to be treated."

"I can imagine," another voice said. It was a man's, vaguely familiar even though Sirius couldn't place it. Was it Remus's? Had it been long enough that his voice had changed, or had Sirius's memory deteriorated so much that he couldn't recognize one of his oldest friends? His only oldest friend now, because James was dead and Peter was a traitor.

"I'm sure you know all about it," the first voice, Sirius was know sure that it was Healer Shacklebolt, said. "But at the same time we can't exactly let him loose, can we? The dementors – after so many years it's more that just depression. The poor dear doesn't have a job or a place to stay or anything. He's liable to camp out in an alley or something if left to his own devices."

"I don't think so," the second voice said. "He has a decent amount of gold in Gringotts and I _think_ he would have the sense to take some out and rent a room at the Leaky Calderon if nothing else."

It was rather rude of them, Sirius thought, to sit outside his door and talk about him without coming in to see him.

"Perhaps," Healer Shacklebolt conceded. "He's doing remarkably well for someone who spent eight years constantly surrounded by dementors, but there's always a danger of relapse, especially in someone without much of a social circle." There was the jingle of keys in a lock, and the door to Sirius's cell opened. "Hello, Sirius," Healer Shacklebolt said with a sort of false cheeriness that had not been in her voice before. "Are you ready to leave St. Mungo's?"

"Yes," Sirius said. So it was Remus, here to take him home. The Healers had said things about 'responsible caretakers' and 'stable environments' and generally made it sound like they wouldn't let him leave the hospital with anyone who didn't have an Order of Merlin, but Remus had always been the one that could talk the teachers into things. He was a prefect, after all.

Healer Shacklebolt stepped out of the doorway, revealing an elderly man who resembled no one so much as Sirius's father. "You're not Remus," Sirius said.

Healer Shacklebolt sighed. "Sirius, darling, we only wrote to him three hours ago. He probably hasn't gotten your letter yet."

 _Three hours?_ That would make his time spent in this little room only an hour and a half rather than eight and a half hours. Forget recovering, if Sirius didn't get out of here soon he was going to go mad.

"This is your grandfather," Healer Shacklebolt continued. "You're going to stay with him for a few months, all right? That way you have someone to look after you while you get better."

Sirius could remember quite a lot about his family, in fact most of his memories seemed to take place when he was home from Hogwarts for the summer. Living with this grandfather, although Sirius had not memories of him in particular, was not likely to help him get better. "I don't want to go back to Grimmauld Place."

"We're not going to Grimmauld Place," the old man – Sirius refused to think of him as his grandfather – said. "I own a house in the country, we're going to stay there."

"Lots of sunlight," Healer Shacklebolt added. "Much better for a body than all this smog in London."

"Indeed," the man said. It was a bit bothersome, Sirius thought, not to know the man's name. It made him feel like that bloke from two cells over, the one who was always going on about people no one else could see. "Besides, it's far easier to avoid attracting the attention of muggles when you aren't surrounded by hordes of them."

"There's nothing wrong with muggles," Sirius said. He remembered that being the crux of all the trouble with his parents: their steadfast insistence that muggles were some kind of vermin lower than house elves.

"I was thinking of Statute of Secrecy concerns," the old man said without skipping a beat. Sirius could almost believe he meant it. "It's a bit difficult to play Quidditch or track thunderbird migration patterns when you have to avoid muggles finding out what you're doing."

Sirius did not answer.

"Not that I play Quidditch much these days," the man continued. "I wasn't much of flyer even when I was young and getting old has only given me an aversion to high speed acrobatics, but I'd imagine that you'd want the opportunity to fly. Regulus said you used to be quite the beater."

A look of confusion crossed Healer Shacklebolt's face.

"His brother, not mine," the old man said softly. "Do you remember Regulus, Sirius?"

"I don't like him," Sirius said. In his memories, Regulus had been little more than a puppet, parroting whatever Mother told him. It was hard to like someone like that. And yet, Sirius could remember being terribly upset when Regulus wouldn't leave with him.

Healer Shacklebolt adopted an expression appropriate to someone who had just swallowed a lemon. It was amusing enough to make Sirius laugh.

The only problem was that Sirius couldn't seem to stop laughing. He was vaguely aware that Healer's Shacklebolt's expression was not nearly funny enough to justify his reaction, but that didn't do anything to stop it.

Fortunately Healer Shacklebolt and the old man seemed determined to ignore Sirius's outburst. "You understand that he'll need to come back for weekly visits until Healer Abbot says otherwise. That's likely to be at least six months."

The old man, Sirius was almost tempted to ask his name, said, "I'll manage. Is that a new policy or is it just because of the dementor exposure?"

"Mostly it's because the Ministry is trying to put the best possible spin on this," Healer Shacklebolt said. "There's no way for them come out blameless, not when an innocent man spent eight and a half years surrounded by dementors because they couldn't be bothered to hold a trial for him, but paying for his medical care makes them look a bit better."

"So it's a cover-up," the old man said, "or an apology, although I am not particularly inclined to give the Ministry the benefit of the doubt at the moment. I suppose they'll have him readmitted if he skips his appointments."

"What are the appointments for?" Sirius asked. It was rather grating to sit and listen to two people talk as though it had already been decided that he was going home with one of them, even though neither of them had actually asked him what he wanted.

"To help you recover and make sure that Arcturus here is looking after you properly," Healer Shacklebolt answered.

Sirius did not need looking after, but as most of the Healers he had mentioned that to earlier had been condescending (at best) or argumentative (at worst) he thought it better not to point that out. "How are they going to help?" he asked. "Sitting in this room staring at nothing hasn't helped me at all so far."

Arcturus, no matter what Sirius had thought earlier he was not happy to have learned the man's name, chuckled. "He's got a point, Prosper."

"Prosperina, if you don't mind," Healer Shacklebolt said, without the slightest hint of annoyance. Sirius thought it rather strange that she was encouraging his grandfather to call her by her first name, as she did not look nearly old enough to be one of his schoolmates. And he could not remember the Shacklebolts being considered a member of the Black's social circle when he was a child.

"As you wish, Prosperina," Arcturus said. "Now, are these weekly visits going to do more than satisfy Healer Abbot's curiosity?"

"They'd make it obvious if you'd been mistreating Sirius," Healer Shacklebolt said, with the air of someone who had just scored a point in an argument rather than someone who really thought that Sirius needed to watched for signs of mistreatment.

"If he's cruel to me, I'll run away," Sirius declared, before realizing that he had made it sound as though he was perfectly willing to go live with Arcturus.

"Just make sure you have somewhere safe to run to," Healer Shacklebolt said. "I hate to think of you starving on the streets." Sirius figured that was a hint that, if anything bad should happen, he was supposed to come back to St. Mungo's.

"I can take care of myself," Sirius said, although there wasn't as much force behind his words as there had been earlier, when the Healers had first told him that they weren't going to let him leave the hospital by himself.

Both Arcturus and Healer Shacklebolt looked for a moment as though they wanted to contradict Sirius, but neither of them said anything.

"So what are all these appointments really for?" Sirius asked, after several seconds of the three of them staring at each other.

"They're to assess your mental health," Healer Shacklebolt said. "Prolonged expose to dementors can have some nasty side-effects and we want to make sure that you recover fully. We wouldn't want you to feel fine and then sink into depression two weeks down the road."

"Is that something that normally happens?" Arcturus asked. "I would think that having the dementors gone would make someone feel a lot better overall."

"It does for the first while," Healer Shacklebolt said, "when people are just glad not to be stuck in Azkaban any longer, but then they get out and can't get back into their old lives. Also, all that time with _only_ their worst memories seems to make people forget that the good times ever happened."

Sirius felt a twinge of something at that remark. _He_ had been very glad to be out of Azkaban and then his good mood had been spoiled by the discovery that he was going to be trapped in St. Mungo's for an indefinite period of time. "Right," he said. "The appointments are important and I should come to them. Anything else?"

"There's nothing else," Healer Shacklebolt said. "If you're ready to go..."

"Very ready," Sirius said. He was not entirely sure about who he was leaving with, but if worse came to worse he could always turn into a dog and run off to Remus's. "As long as I don't have to visit Grimmauld Place." More specifically, as long as he didn't have to visit the people who lived there.

"You do know that your parents are dead, right?" Arcturus asked.

Healer Shacklebolt glared at him.

Arcturus shrugged. "He's going to find out eventually and I don't see the point in hiding it from him."

"I'm fine," Sirius said. He really was. His parents, especially his mother, had haunted his days in Azkaban and it was more of a relief than anything else to know that there wasn't the slightest chance of running into them.

Healer Shacklebolt did not look at all convinced. "They're your parents, dearie. It's all right for you to be upset by their deaths. Healthy, even. Bottling up your emotions–"

"I'm not bottling up any emotions," Sirius said, far more harshly than he had meant to. "I haven't spoken to my parents since I ran away from home when I was sixteen, why should I be upset to learn that they're dead?"

"Regulus is dead too," Arcturus said. "He died about a year before you were incarcerated."

 _That_ was far more of a shock than his parents' deaths. "He was seventeen," Sirius said. "Sure, he had–" Sirius broke off, realizing that it might not be the best idea for him to tell Healer Shacklebolt, someone that he hardly knew at all, that his brother had been a Death Eater. Even if Regulus _was_ dead and couldn't be arrested any more. " _How?_ "

"I don't know," Arcturus said. "He left Grimmauld Place on an errand near the end of August and two days later the tapestry recorded his death. I'm told that your mother was hysterical."

Mother's hysterics had been an ever increasing phenomenon during Sirius's years at school, so he could not be bothered to care much about them. "Where did they find him?"

"No one ever did," Arcturus said. "Wherever he went, it was far enough outside the area frequented by humans that, in ten years, no one has any idea where he went or how he died. Either that or whoever killed him did a _much_ more thorough job hiding the body than was usual at the time."

Healer Shacklebolt cleared her throat, causing both Blacks to turn and look at her. "Perhaps this is a conversation that would best take place at home," she said.

"You're quite right, Prosperina," Arcturus said. "We can save any discussion of details until after Sirius is settled in."

"I don't want to get settled in first," Sirius said. "I want to know what happened to my brother. He didn't just go out for a walk and drop dead."

"You're taking this much worse than I thought you would," Arcturus said.

"All the more reason for it to wait a bit," Healer Shacklebolt said. It might have been Sirius's imagination, because there was not one thing about her that was anything but strictly professional, but she looked very uncomfortable.

"What if I don't want to go live with him?" Sirius asked. "You both keep assuming I will, but neither of you actually asked me."

Healer Shacklebolt looked absolutely dumbstruck, which probably made sense because Sirius had been so eager to leave the hospital and normal people liked their grandparents anyway.

"You don't have to stay with me if you don't want to," Arcturus said. His voice was weary, almost resigned, as though he had known all along that Sirius was not going to leave with him and had just being hoping he was wrong. "I thought it would be a good idea because I didn't know who else you would stay with and I did want to talk to you about Regulus and possibly getting into Grimmauld Place to look through his things."

"Couldn't you do that on your own?" Sirius asked. Grimmauld Place was the ancestral family home, as the oldest of the Blacks it should have belonged to Arcturus, or Sirius's other grandfather, now that he thought of it Arcturus hadn't said which side of Sirius's family he was on.

Arcturus sighed. "Do you remember the last time I fought with your parents. The one where your father kicked me out of the house and I told him he could keep it?"

Sirius suddenly found himself much more kindly disposed to the idea of living with his grandfather. Anyone who had fought with his parents had to have some redeeming qualities.

"You might have been too young for it," Arcturus continued. "You were only five at the time."

"It probably blended in with all the other shouting," Sirius said. There had been quite a lot of it, mainly from his mother but Sirius's father had occasionally gotten involved.

"Anyways. Your parents took me at my word. The next time I dropped in for a visit, I found myself unable to enter the building. I tried owling, but if Orion got any of my letters he never bothered to write me back."

"Why didn't you take the house back after he died?" Sirius asked.

"And turn my widowed daughter-in-law out of her home?" Arcturus shook his head. "Even if I needed that kind of scandal, I'm not cruel enough to do it. Besides, Regulus was alive then."

"And you didn't try after Moth- after _she_ died?" Sirius knew he would have, if he had wanted to go through Regulus's things to see if he had left any hints as to where he was really going on the night he died, he wouldn't have waited for anyone to die first.

"I was in America, studying thunderbirds with Lucretia, when your mother died," Arcturus said. Sirius could vaguely remember his parents talking about Lucretia, the obsessive aunt who had apprenticed herself to a magizoologist straight out of O.W.L.s and moved to America to study thunderbirds at the first opportunity. "I didn't hear about her death for nearly sixth months, and when I finally managed to make it over to see about the house I was told that had been inherited by you and that, unless I wanted to get involved in a costly and unpopular lawsuit, I was best off waiting for you to die."

"And that's what you did," Sirius said. Any goodwill he had had towards the man had evaporated at the thought that he had spent the last several years hoping Sirius would die.

"It seemed like the best idea at the time," Arcturus said. "I could have sued you for possession of the house, but as any such lawsuit would require removing you from Azkaban for a number of months, it was likely to make me extremely unpopular."

"Because _that's_ such a horrible thing to live with," Sirius said. Remus had always managed it without complaint, and _he_ didn't have enough galleons to fill a swimming pool the way most of Sirius's family did.

"From what Regulus said, you were always very well-liked by most everyone who wasn't in Slytherin," Arcturus said. "I did consider pushing for you to be tried, but I did not think the Ministry would be convinced to acquit you without at least _some_ evidence of your innocence and as I had none I thought it best to wait until evidence surfaced."

Sirius had only really picked up on one aspect of that statement. "You _knew_ I was innocent. And you left me to rot in Azkaban!"

"I _suspected_ you were innocent," Arcturus said, as calmly as though he were talking about the weather than his only remaining grandchild's imprisonment. "I could have insisted that you be tried, but without any evidence of your innocence, and with Barty Crouch running the DMLE, you would have been convicted, sentence to life imprisonment in Azkaban, and nothing but a signed confession from Peter Pettigrew would have gotten you out."

Healer Shacklebolt cleared her throat loudly. "I think all this is a bit too much excitement for one day. Arcturus, since Sirius isn't going to live with you–"

"I didn't say that," Sirius said, realizing that if he didn't he was liable to be trapped in her, alone, for a very long time. "I was upset, because you didn't ask me what I wanted."

Arcturus raised an eyebrow.

"If it doesn't work out, I can go stay with Remus later," Sirius said. Or rather, he could go stay with Remus as soon as he had milked the old man for ever bit of information concerning Regulus's death. Because Regulus had been an annoying, brown-nosing, snitch... but he had been Sirius's brother and it wasn't as though Sirius had something better to do with his time. "Can we leave now?"

Healer Shacklebolt did not appear entirely convinced by Sirius's statement, but she said, "Of course."

* * *

A/N: While I have used the Black Family Tree as a basis for the Blacks in this story, I have made a few adjustments in order to smooth out some inconsistencies between it and the books. Most importantly, I have Regulus (Sirius's brother) being born in 1963 and dying in 1980 at the age of seventeen.


	2. The Final Days of Regulus Black

Much to Sirius's displeasure, Arcturus did not seem in any sort of hurry to head home, where they could talk freely about Regulus. The pessimistic, untrusting side of Sirius thought it likely that he was delaying a conversation that was sure to be unpleasant in hopes that Sirius would forget about it. The rest of Sirius thought it much more likely that Arcturus really did want to avoid needing to come back to Diagon Alley in a few hours for robes and a wand.

And so Sirius clenched his teeth and sat patiently through Madam Malkin's fussing over how thin he was and endlessly debating the merits of different sleeve shapes and asking if he wanted dress robes without snapping at her even once. It was fortunate that the wand for him was in one of the first dozen Ollivander pulled off the shelves, because Sirius was not sure how much waving wands around to no effect he could manage before he exploded.

"So, what do you know about Regulus?" Sirius asked the moment they stepped through the door of Arcturus's house. "Considering the terms on which you last parted with my parents, I really can't see them letting their obedient little boy anywhere near you, but there were an awful lot of things that you said Regulus had said about me."

Arcturus sighed. "Can't this wait until you've settled in a bit? It's nearly time for dinner, and I have strict orders not to let you skip meals."

"No," Sirius said. "I want to know what happened to Regulus. That's why I came home with you, because you didn't want to talk about it in front of Healer Shacklebolt."

"You didn't have any desire at all to get out of St. Mungo's?" Arcturus asked. He hung up his cloak and started off down the hall. Sirius followed him.

"I could have waited for Remus," Sirius said. It might have driven him mad, but he could have. He _would_ have, if there hadn't been something that Sirius wanted to know.

Arcturus nodded, but there was a glint to his eye that made Sirius think he wasn't buying it. "Remus... he was one of the other boys you used to run around with, wasn't he, along with James Potter and Peter Pettigrew."

"Yes," Sirius said. For half a moment he was back in Hogwarts with the three of them, laughing as they ate sweets and endlessly debated what prank to pull on the Slytherins next. Then he blinked and Hogwarts had vanished, replaced by Arcturus Black's living room. "Regulus told you that, didn't he?"

"You should probably write Remus another letter telling him that you're no longer at St. Mungo's," Arcturus said. "It would be embarrassing if he came to pick you up and you weren't there."

Sirius hadn't thought of that. In the back of his head there had been the vague idea that Healer Shacklebolt would take care of it, but now that he thought of it there wasn't any good reason for her to do so. "I'll do that later," he said.

Arcturus frowned.

"My letter is still going to reach him four hours after the one from the hospital," Sirius said. "So if he goes to pick me up right away there isn't much of a point."

"You thought he might not come to pick you up right away, but he was still the only person you asked to take you home from the hospital?"

"Remus is responsible," Sirius said, to cover the real reason Remus might not come for a few days: the timing of the last full moon, which Sirius did not know. "He'll probably want to gather up proof of residency and employment and all that so that the Healers don't refuse to let me live with him."

"I suppose he doesn't have the benefit of a prior acquaintance with one of the Healers on staff," Arcturus said after a second's thought.

"You knew Healer Shacklebolt _before_ you came to get me?" Sirius had kind of figured that, given the way they had spoken to each other, but he was still curious about it.

Arcturus settled himself into one of the armchairs, a stiff, understuffed thing not at all like the cozy armchairs Sirius remembered from the Gryffindor common room. "I thought you wanted to know about Regulus?"

"Yes," Sirius said. "I thought it was a bit funny that you just happened to know one of the Healers assigned to my care."

"I think you're mixing up cause and effect," Arcturus said. "Healer Shacklebolt took particular interest in you because she knew that you were my grandson. There's not any coincidence to it. Sit down, please. You look like you're about ready to keel over."

Sirius thought he probably only looked sickly because he had spent so much time in Azkaban, as he certainly didn't _feel_ like he was in any danger of falling over. "I'm fine standing for a bit. What were you going to tell me about Regulus?"

Arcturus made a face that suggested he thought Sirius was only remaining standing because he had asked him to sit down, but he didn't challenge him on it. "I met Regulus for the first time since my falling out with your parents the summer before his fifth year at Hogwarts. He claimed that he was curious about his father's childhood and Orion refused to talk about it. I thought it more likely that Walburga had put him up to it because she was afraid I would follow in Alpharad's shoes and make you the sole beneficiary in my will unless she did something about it."

That sounded like exactly the sort of thing Sirius's mother would have done, although he was at a loss to understand why she would have thought that Arcturus would cut his 'respectable' son and grandson out of his will in favor of the unruly scalawag who had been sorted into Gryffindor, especially when he had never had any contact with said unruly scalawag. Perhaps that was when she had begun the downward spiral into the madness that seemed to be the eventual fate of most members of the Black family.

"Nevertheless, I spoke with Regulus frequently over the summer. I answered his questions and continued to write him when he returned to Hogwarts. He came to visit me again over Christmas break and when your father died shortly before term resumed I was the one who arranged for him to return to school after the funeral."

"That's very nice," Sirius said, conscious of the fact that he needed to stay on Arcturus's good side if he wanted him to tell him anything. "But can we skip to the part when Regulus gets involved with the Death Eaters. I'm not seeing the point to all of this..."

Arcturus sighed and leaned forward enough to rest his forehead against the tips of his fingers. "I suppose I should have known better then to expect you to have any interest in how the situation developed." Before Sirius could make any remarks about old people and boring tangents, Arcturus sat up again and looked him in the eye. "The _point_ , Sirius, is that Regulus was already involved with the Death Eaters when he first approached me."

"But he would have been _fourteen_ ," Sirius said. "Maybe fifteen, if it was near the end of summer, but that's still too young to be worth bothering with. Dum– _The Ministry_ didn't even start encouraging kids to become Aurors until after they've taken their O.W.L.s at least."

"The Dark Lord has always preferred to recruit his follows younger than either the Ministry or Albus Dumbledore– don't look at me like that, I'm not stupid, I know he was involved _somehow_ – nevertheless, Regulus was unusually young to be actively recruited, yet alone given assignments." Arcturus's face took on a bitter cast. "He said that Bellatrix had played that up as an honor, proof that he was guaranteed to go somewhere within the ranks if only he performed adequately. Walburga was so _proud._ "

"You're going off on a tangent again," Sirius said. "What was Regulus supposed to be doing? He can't have been fighting, not when he was still in school all the time _and_ had the Trace on him."

"Gathering information, primarily," Arcturus answered. "As a Hogwarts student, he had access to the entire school library, including a number of texts that are not generally in circulation. Also, he was a prime candidate to gain access to the Black Family Library, which I had moved out of Grimmauld Place after I inherited it."

"So that's why he wanted to talk to you," Sirius said. "He wanted to go to your house and nick your books." It was sort of funny, if Sirius didn't think about how Regulus had died two short years later from the aftereffects of this. "When did he finally come clean?"

"Shortly after his sixteenth birthday," Arcturus said. "He came to stay with me for most of the summer. Apparently, Bellatrix had taken Orion's death as an opportunity to press Regulus into doing more and more for the Dark Lord and went a bit too far. Regulus decided he no longer wanted in, and took refuge in my house, where Bellatrix was no longer welcome as a result of... prior misadventures with the aforementioned library."

Sirius chuckled. "You caught her trying to make off with one of your books, you mean."

Arcturus blanched. "No, I did _not_. Back on topic, Regulus's attempt was only mostly successful. He got a barrage of letters every day that he immediately burned. He claimed he'd gotten in an argument with his mother over his relationship with Bellatrix and that now they were both mad at him."

"Did you believe that?" Sirius had received numerous Howlers throughout his school years, and he reckoned that if Mummy had every been mad at dear little Reggie she would have expressed her disapproval in the same way.

Arcturus paused, his mouth twisting into a sort of half-frown that Sirius figured was what passed for concentrated on Arcturus. "It's difficult to say now, knowing what was actually going on. I _knew_ that he was hiding from someone. I don't think I much cared who it was at the time. I was too busy being happy that he had decided to hide with me."

"So that was it?" Sirius said. He was a bit disappointed in his little brother. Sure Regulus had always been rather stupid and almost completely useless in a fight, but he had expected something a little more dramatic. "He hid with you until he had to go back to school and Bellatrix finally got him next summer."

"Bellatrix got him that summer," Arcturus said, "when Regulus when to Diagon Alley to do his school shopping. She got him off alone and side-along apparated him off to a meeting with the Dark Lord, whose orders he had been ignoring all summer. He promptly blamed me for everything. I was controlling, I suspected he was up to something, I wanted to spend every minute of his time rambling on about my long-forgotten youth. He _had_ done some digging in the portions of my library I had told him not to touch and he managed to hand over enough information to convince them that he'd been obediently following orders all along."

" _I_ would have told the 'Dark Lord' and all his cronies to go to hell," Sirius said.

"And then they would have killed you and you would have been dead," Arcturus said, in a perfectly even voice that somehow managed to carry a great deal of tension.

"Fat lot of good it did him, since they killed him next year," Sirius said, his voice not at all even.

In the second of silence that followed, Sirius realized that Arcturus was very upset by this. It wasn't so much the expression on his face, which had probably been schooled from years of running around with Slytherins not to let anything Arcturus really thought come through, so much as the way that he was gripping the arms of his chair hard enough to turn his knuckles white.

Sirius had thought, when Arcturus had been so cagey about what had happened, that he was trying to hide something or that he enjoyed tormenting Sirius by making him wring out the truth drop by drop. It hadn't occurred to Sirius that Arcturus might have been actually _hurt_ by Regulus's death. He was a Slytherin and Sirius had never noticed any of them having much in the way of emotions at all. They had been too wrapped up in hexing muggleborns and toadying up to Slughorn to be bothered with such things.

"I'm sorry," Sirius mumbled, a little too proud to say it clearly. "I... That wasn't a very nice thing to say. Regulus... He still had the Trace on him. They couldn't have done anything to him without alerting the DMLE."

Arcturus seemed to accept that as enough of an apology, because he said, "If the Death Eaters haven't found a way to circumvent the Trace entirely, they certainly managed to get someone in the department to cover up their activities for them."

"No, we got warning from the Trace sometimes," Sirius said. Not nearly often enough, now that he thought about it, but he had only been a full-fledged Auror for a couple of months before getting thrown in Azkaban and all he could remember of that time was a frenetic haze of too much to do and not enough sleep. "When the Bones were murdered, we found out about the attack through the trace."

" _Exactly_ ," Arcturus said. "When the Bones were _murdered_. By the time you showed up they were all already dead and the Death Eaters had fled."

"Yes," Sirius said, finally understanding what Arcturus was trying to get at. "So, they probably _could_ have killed him then and there, if they were willing the scramble out of the area afterwards, but I really can't see Bella letting Reggie off that lightly if she thought he'd turned on her."

"Ignoring the fact that your list of light punishments includes _death–_ "

You know what I mean," Sirius snapped. Or maybe he didn't, if his familiarity with Bellatrix only extended as far as her trying to weasel her way into his library.

"Unfortunately, yes." A shiver passed across Arcturus's frame, almost too quickly to be seen. "I also know that Bellatrix does not need a wand to make someone wish she had killed them."

Sirius had forgotten about Bella's fondness for knives. Probably because her aggression, while disturbing and unpleasant to be around, had usually been directed at either dolls or small animals and never at anything that Sirius actually cared about.

"And, if the Death Eaters as a whole didn't know how to circumvent the Trace, Bellatrix certainly did." Arcturus paused, seeming to realize something. "Shortly after your incarceration, Frank and Alice Longbottom were tortured into insanity, primarily using the Cruciatus Curse, with their infant son in the next room."

"Frank and Alice," Sirius repeated. He could remember them, the happy couple who managed to find joy in the worst of times. Always good for a bit of cheer or a word of advice. Especially Alice, who had the amazing ability to remember _every single one_ of the most trivial protocols. "The Longbottoms. Bellatrix–"

"Was caught, along with Rudolphus and Rabastan Lestrange and _Barty Crouch's_ son of all people, several hours later when Augusta Longbottom decided to pay her son a visit."

"Augusta Longbottom managed to take out Bellatrix, her husband, his brother, and another person without getting killed." Frank had always talked about how scary his mother was and how she had been a dueling champion before old age had finally caught up with her, so Sirius had known that Mrs. Longbottom was not to be trifled with, but he hadn't thought she would be _that_ good.

"From my understanding, she arrived home, immediately realized that something was amiss and followed the screaming up to where the Lestrages were at work. Crouch was supposed to be keeping watch, but he was too..." Arcturus trailed off, his lip curled upwards into an expression of distaste. "Engrossed in what was happening to be bothered with it. Augusta stunned him, Bellatrix, and Rudolphus before any of them knew what was happening."

Which would have left her dueling Rabastan, the youngest of the Lestranges and probably the worst in combat. "I don't think I would have settled for stunning them," Sirius said.

"I'm not sure I would have either," Arcturus said. "Even knowing that it would be better if the people captured were fit for questioning. And that the Ministry is unlikely to look kindly upon vigilante justice."

"The Aurors have been known to turn a blind eye to a certain amount of violence, given enough incentive. Especially when Crouch was in charge," Sirius said. Hell, the man had authorized the use of the Cruciatous curse on suspects. He wasn't likely to be too upset by some old lady beating up the people who had been torturing her son.

"Bribing the Ministry doesn't really appeal to me," Arcturus said. "And it makes me worry a bit about the impartiality of our criminal justice system."

"Didn't you pay the Minister of Magic to give you an Order of Merlin?" Sirius asked. Arcturus shot him a look that could have curdled milk. "That's what Father made it sound like."

"For your information, the Ministry was roughly a hundred galleons away from bankruptcy when I made a _very_ large donation to the Restoration Fund and refrained from inquiring too much about where that money was spent or making a fuss when the Ministry preferred making payroll to building a monument to those lost in Grindewald's War. Now do you want to hear what happened to Regulus or not?"

"I want you to tell me what happened to Regulus," Sirius said, even though a part of him was tempted to ask for a rundown of who all had died and what laws had been changed when he was in Azkaban. For some stupid reason, he had thought that the world had sort of stopped when he was imprisoned and had only just started running again.

"Right." Arcturus paused for a second, his eyes flicking upwards as though he had forgotten where he was in the story and was trying to remember it. "Regulus blamed me for his absence and claimed to be a faithful servant of the Dark Lord. He asked to be given a task– any task– to prove his loyalty."

"They had him kill someone," Sirius said, his heart sinking in his chest. He had hoped that somehow, his little brother would have been able to avoid that. It would fit in with what little he remembered of Regulus that wasn't shadowed over by Mother's wishes. He had pitched a fit whenever Sirius had stomped on spiders, insisting that he should pick them up gently and let them go outside.

"No," Arcturus said. "I don't think there was anyone on hand that the Dark Lord was willing to sacrifice and they didn't want to send a sixteen year-old, who still had the Trace on him, off to murder someone who had already been marked an enemy of the Death Eaters. There were too many ways that could go wrong."

"They could have captured someone, brought them back to wherever they were hiding and then have Regulus kill the bloke," Sirius said. In retrospect, that might have been the explanation for all those people who went missing and were never found or who did turn up someplace they never would have entered voluntarily.

"That would have eliminated most of the risk, yes," Arcturus said, "but I think that Regulus, at least until he finished school, was not meant to be anything more than a spy. If he had killed for them, he would have been theirs, but there was a very real risk that he would refuse. And if he did, then they would not only have to find another student to monitor Dumbledore and copy information from the Hogwarts Library, but also someone to worm their way into my good graces."

"He was too valuable to kill," Sirius concluded. It sounded odd to say that about a little boy, only just passed his O.W.L.s, who had evidently not been too valuable to kill a short year later.

"And, at least the way Regulus told it and I am willing to admit that he might not be an entirely unbiased source of information, there were a number of Death Eaters who believed him," Arcturus said. "Bellatrix among them. With no _proof_ of treachery, it would be risky to kill Regulus outright. Some people might take it as a sign that the Dark Lord did not care for his followers as much as he claimed to, or that he was liable to snap and start offing the rest of them on spurious grounds."

"Bella'd be pissed too," Sirius said. "She got so nasty when she was angry." It hadn't been all _that_ easy to make her angry, but killing her younger cousin for trying to do his job too well was probably a good way to do it.

"Whatever the reason, Regulus wasn't killed then. Instead, the Dark Lord said, if he really was a loyal servant to the cause, he would be willing to wear the Dark Mark–"

"How? He couldn't go around with it painted on his robes if he wanted to avoid being tossed in Azkaban, let alone do anything in the way of spywork," but even as he said it, Sirius knew there had to be more to it. Wearing the Dark Mark... he had heard something like that before, if he could only remember where.

"Not quite that blatantly," Arcturus said. "The Dark Lord's inner circle, the best of the Death Eaters you might say, had a copy of the Dark Mark branded on the inside of their left forearms. Regulus said that they could be used both to alert the Dark Lord and to receive summons from him. It was considered a high honor."

Exactly the kind of thing Regulus couldn't refuse if he wanted to appear devout. "It would have made it a lot more difficult for Regulus to go over the Ministry." He might have been able to pass some information, but it would be difficult to convince anyone that he had really changed sides if he was 'voluntarily' wearing around You-Know-Who's symbol.

"Yes, and anyone who saw it would know that he was an active supporter of the Dark Lord. Those who agreed with the Death Eater's aims would see him as an ally, if not a superior to be obeyed. Those who disagreed..." Arcturus trailed off. "He would have to hide it at school and it would be a constant reminder of who he had pledged himself to."

"Only, it didn't work, did it?" Sirius's voice was raw and he found himself walking a circuit around the room to avoid looking his grandfather in the eye. "He went and told you about it."

Arcturus nodded. "He came back from his trip to Diagon Alley several hours after he had said he would return, looking remarkably like he had spent the last several _weeks_ fending for himself on a deserted island. I knew that something was wrong and it took very little pushing to get him to tell me everything. Regulus wanted out."

"But you didn't get him out, did you?" Sirius snapped. It would have been easy for Arcturus to do so, or at least a lot easier than for most people. He had connections, all he would have to do would be to get Regulus a portkey to France or Egypt or someplace and Regulus would have been safe. "You made him stay and it killed him."

Arcturus took a deep breath and let it out again slowly, but his voice was still ragged when he spoke, "It was only a couple of weeks before classes started at Hogwarts. Regulus and I both assumed that he would be safe in school. It was too late to transfer him to a different one, especially under a false identity. And O.W.L.s aren't the qualifications they were when I finished school. He'd have difficulty getting a job."

"You're _rich_! Couldn't you have given him a bunch of money and had him hole up in a hotel somewhere?" Sirius was beating a path from one end of the room to the other, stomping hard enough to be heard despite the thick carpet.

"Because a young man not old enough to be out on his own, taking a room in an inn that he somehow has money to pay for despite never leaving the inn for anything, is not suspicious at all," Arcturus said. "Even the muggle authorities might think it worth investigating. People don't have money unless they work for it, have a lot of investments, or are doing something illegal. And we didn't know how long he'd have to keep it up. We didn't know that the war would end two years later! We thought that Regulus would be hiding for the rest of his life."

"If you really thought that You-Know-Who was going to win, why didn't you try to do _something_ to stop him instead of sitting in your fancy house and letting him take over!" The Blacks had, with the exception of Sirius, been considered the pinnacle of pure-blood society, surely if one of their oldest members had spoken against the Death Eaters it would have weakened their support at least a little.

"I did what I could! I wrote to the _Daily Prophet_! I funded–"

Wrote to the _Daily Prophet_. Sirius could remember that. Crouch had complained about it for weeks. "You made a blanket statement condemning violence! Everyone thought it was because Crouch had authorized Aurors to start using Unforgiveables! They thought you didn't care about what the Death Eaters were doing!"

"It was the week after the Edgar Bones was murdered, along with his entire family, for who-knows-what reason! I specifically mentioned–"

"Well you weren't specific enough! I doubt there's a single person in Britain who understood what you were 'trying' to hint at!"

"Is Master Arcturus needing any help?" a high, wheezy voice said from somewhere near Arcturus's knee. Sirius left off his ranting long enough to see that it belonged to a house elf, probably female and not much past maturity. Sirius had never much concerned himself with telling apart house elves.

"Everything's fine, Mimsy," Arcturus said.

The house elf gave him a curious look, perhaps sensing that he was not being entirely truthful and then turned to glare at Sirius. "If the intruder is causing Master Arcturus any trouble–"

Sirius sniffed and held his head up high. Who cared what house elves thought?

"The 'intruder'," Arcturus said, with a hint of waspishness, "is my grandson and invited guest. You are to obey his orders as though they were my own."

The house elf did not look at all pleased by this turn of events. Sirius couldn't blame her, even if he was living with Arcturus, it was still unusual for a wizard to give a guest that kind of authority over a house elf. 'Look after his needs', yes, 'obey his orders within reason', yes, but 'obey him without question'? Sirius would have no difficulty leaving whenever he wanted.

"Mimsy will obey Master Arcturus's wishes," the house elf said. Her gaze was fixed on Sirius, as though daring him to try and order her around. She would probably rat out everything he did to Arcturus unless he ordered her not to, the same way Kreacher had always ratted him out to Mother.

"Thank you, Mimsy. Is dinner ready or were you merely concerned by the amount of noise we were making?" Arcturus did not sound nearly as upset as Sirius knew his mother would have been under similar circumstances. He was probably secretly grateful that the house elf had come along and stopped Sirius from shouting at him.

"Mimsy will finish dinner," the house elf said, before disappearing with an audible pop. Sirius frowned, trying to figure out when the house elf had come in. He couldn't remember any noise and would have thought that he was alert enough to notice someone, even if it was only a house elf, walking into the room.

Arcturus continued, "Regulus went back to school and all seemed well at first. He wrote me as often as he could, told me what information he was passing on and, while none of it was harmless, there was nothing earthshaking. Nothing to change the tide of the war."

"The tide of the war was firmly on You-Know-Who's side at that point," Sirius said. It wasn't that he was trying to provoke a fight, exactly, but he wasn't going to let Arcturus sit there and make claims that were patently false.

"Nothing to give him the final shove he needed to end it all, then," Arcturus said, rather more amiably than Sirius had expected. "I didn't see him over Christmas. I was in America, making preparations. Regulus spent the holidays with his mother and he told me that they were uneventful, except that he had discovered something. Something too dangerous to be talked about over the mail."

A part of Sirius wondered if that was true. Regulus had always thrived on attention, this news could easily be a bid for him to get Arcturus all to himself for a bit. Although, exaggeration was never one of Regulus's flaws. Quite the opposite, he could take the most exciting story and turn it into a history lesson to rival one of Binns' simply by making the least of everything that happened.

"We met again over Easter, but Regulus spent almost the entire time pouring over my library," Arcturus said. "More specifically, the portions of my library I had kept out of public eyes for years. He told me that he thought the Dark Lord had done something, something to make him unkillable, and he wanted to know all the possibilities."

"There are _a lot_ of ways to make yourself invulnerable?" Sirius said. He couldn't think of even _one_ , and Crouch would have given his eyeteeth for something to reduce Auror casualties during those last days of the war.

"Half a dozen or so that Regulus considered," Arcturus said. "They all have numerous disadvantages, and most of them are firmly in the realm of the Dark Arts. Not that that would stop the Dark Lord, but few people want to know about such practices, let alone use them."

"Did Regulus decide on any one of them?" Sirius asked.

"Not to my knowledge," Arcturus said. "He ruled out a few. For example, he thought it unlikely that the Dark Lord had created a Philosopher's Stone, because the elixir of life would not protect him from violence and he would be dependent on it once he had passed his natural years of life."

"And you didn't think there was one that was more likely than the rest?" Surely, there would have been a couple like that, better known and easier to create.

"No." Arcturus grimaced, his gaze drifting off into space. "Regulus, he made it sound as though this method of immortality was entirely new, or a combination of older methods."

"He can't have invented a new way to make himself immortal," Sirius said. "Messing around with stuff like that's risky, and he never risked himself if he could help it." He never risked himself at all as far as most of the Aurors were concerned, leaving it to the Death Eaters to die or get arrested. Sure, You-Know-Who killed people himself occasionally, and took part in some battles, but it was never ones that the Death Eaters had any chance of loosing.

Arcturus shot a funny look at Sirius, as though he was not looking at Sirius at all, but rather someone else who had stepped into his place for a moment. "That's exactly what Regulus said."

Ordinarily, Sirius would have made a comment about 'great minds thinking alike' or something of that nature, but he was a bit too shocked by the idea that he and Regulus had _agreed_ on something to speak. That hadn't happened since long before Sirius had left for Hogwarts, if it had happened at all.

"Easter break was over soon enough, and Regulus was back at school. I had not allowed him to take any of my books with him, but he had taken far more extensive notes then I was really comfortable with so that he could do more 'thinking' while he was at school. I put the finishing touches on my plan. We were going to go to America to visit Lucretia for a couple of weeks. Just before it was time for us to go home there would be a terrible accident. Splinched heart from botching side-along apparition. Very messy, almost instantly lethal. There would be a whole mess with the American Ministry, but I knew how it would fall out. I'd probably lose my license for side-along apparition, but I'd bring what was left of Regulus home for a funeral. At the beginning of August, Lucretia would be joined by her new intern, a young man from Australia named Robert Brown who was–"

"Really Regulus with a load of charms on him," Sirius finished. He was not terribly interested in hearing more. "It sounds like it would have worked. Why didn't it?"

"When the school year was over, Regulus wrote me a letter, telling me that he couldn't go through with the plan," Arcturus said. "He hadn't been given permission to leave the country for long enough, and he needed to stay with the Death Eaters for just a little longer. He was very close to finding out something important."

"And he didn't think to tell you what?" Damn Slytherins, and their stupid need for sneakiness. If Regulus had just come clean with all of this, maybe not to the Ministry given the number of spies that had been in it, but to Sirius or Dumbledore or Arcturus or _anyone_ they would actually know what he thought was important.

"I assumed it had something to do with his discovery of the Dark Lord's immortality," Arcturus said. "Or the immortality Regulus thought he had, because the Dark Lord met his end not much more than a year later."

"Unless Regulus was right and he died getting rid of whatever was keeping You-Know-Who from being killed." Sirius decided that he rather liked that theory. It was a heroic way to die, much better then being hunted down and killed for backing out.

"That's possible," Arcturus said. He did not sound as though he thought it was terribly likely. "By the time Regulus disappeared, I had returned to England. Heath reasons, supposedly. Regulus wrote me a couple of times during the summer, but he didn't ask for my help with anything."

"Maybe he thought that you were old and wouldn't be much help in a fight," Sirius suggested, ignoring the little voice in the back of his mind saying that he shouldn't antagonize the person he was stuck with for the next however long. "He probably didn't want you to get hurt."

"I'm not nearly as useless as you think I am," Arcturus said. "Even if I were, I could have helped him plan, made sure that he had all his facts straight. Talk him out of doing anything to rash."

"If he was planning to do anything rash, he wouldn't have wanted you to talk him out of it," Sirius said. "He might have left you a note or something, in case he didn't come back, but he wouldn't have warned you in advance."

Arcturus sighed. "I suppose not. If he left a note, I never found it. I never found the notes he made on my books either. I suspect they're still at Grimmauld Place. That's why I was hoping you would give me access to the house."

"Right," Sirius said, not quite knowing what else to say. Arcturus probably wouldn't take it too well if he suggested they headed back to London this minute to start looking through Regulus's old things. "I suppose that will have to wait for tomorrow."


	3. Letters

The next morning, Sirius realized that he had a problem. He had awakened later than he had expected, probably close to noon, feeling better than he had felt in years. It was only when he hopped out of bed and shuffled over to the bathroom that he realized what was wrong.

He was walking on four legs. Four short, furry legs that did not belong to a human. He must have transformed in his sleep as a way to deal with the nightmares. That had happened (probably) when he was in Azkaban, but he had voluntarily spent so much time as a dog that he had never really thought much about it.

Half a second later, Sirius was fully human and as ready for the day as he had even been. He could only hope the house elf hadn't come in to clean his room or something and seen his as a dog. She'd rat to Arcturus the first chance she got, and Sirius didn't think his grandfather would be happy to learn that the just-out-of-Azkaban relative that he had taken in was an illegal animagus.

Sirius stepped out into the hall, humming to himself as he tried to remember where the stairs were. His room was upstairs, so he had to have used them sometime last night. The kitchen would be somewhere downstairs and if the house elf didn't have something waiting for him, Sirius could make his own breakfast. He had done it often enough.

Maybe there would be a letter for Remus waiting for him at the breakfast table. Sirius had written him a sort of note last night (Remus, I'm staying with my grandfather so I'm not stuck in St. Mungo's. Sirius) and it wasn't too much to hope that he had had time to read it and write back, even if the moon last night had only begun to wane.

Sirius should probably figure out something for Harry as well. Sure, Lily had _said_ she wanted her sister looking after him if anything happened to her and James, but that was only supposed to be temporary. Something about blood and protections and Sirius really _had_ been paying attention to it but Lily had been rather cagey about it and all those whispered conversations, the what-ifs that none of them had dared speak out loud, had blurred together when he was in Azkaban and hadn't yet separated out.

Trying to force them apart was not only useless, it had given Sirius a blinding headache by the time he had located the kitchen and started in on the toast and fruit that had been left out, no doubt by the house elf.

He ate mechanically, partly because it had better not to think about what exactly he had been shoveling into his mouth when he was in Azkaban and partly because he still wasn't sure about Harry. Remus wouldn't mind having someone else around the house, and Sirius still had enough money left from Uncle Alphard that he would be able to feed and clothe a kid without straining himself.

The problem was that Sirius was almost certain Remus would panic at the idea of having a child anywhere near him when he transformed, no matter what safety precautions he took. And then there was the other problem, because Sirius wasn't living with Remus yet, and Arcturus Black probably wouldn't be happy with the idea of taking in a nine year old halfblood.

"Sirius, are you all right?" a concerned voice asked. Sirius blinked, and Arcturus was standing right in front of him. "You've been starting at the wall for five minutes."

"I'm fine," Sirius said hastily. "I was thinking."

Arcturus nodded, as though that was everything he had wanted to know, but then he kept staring at Sirius.

"About Harry," Sirius said, hoping that giving a little bit would satisfy Arcturus. Then, deciding that he might as well go all out, he added,"I'm his godfather. I reckon I should be taking care of him. Lily's sister never really liked her much and she's a muggle. Probably doesn't have the faintest clue how to deal with accidental magic and such." And maybe the idea of sharing houseroom with a small boy, that troublemaker James Potter's son, would make Arcturus let Sirius off by himself sooner.

"She'll manage," Arcturus said dryly. Sirius thought he might suspect an ulterior motive. "Muggle-borns have gotten along perfectly well for generations, and none of their parents had the benefit of knowing about magic before their children started turning people orange."

That was a lot more charitable than Sirius expected any of the Blacks to be about muggle-borns. Even Uncle Alphard, who had been vocally (for a Black) opposed to You-Know-Who, would never had said anything like that around Walburga. "I should check in on him, at least. Make sure that Primrose-" or Posey or whatever her name was, Sirius was not at all upset that he didn't know it because she was Lily's sister and it wasn't like he had ever met the woman "-doesn't starve him or anything. She really didn't like Lily."

Arcturus rolled his eyes. "Harry isn't Lily. It's been eight years, I'm sure Primrose Potter-in-Law has matured a little since you last saw her. No mother would have left her child with someone she thought would mistreat him."

Walburga Black would have, but Sirius didn't think that would have been a wise thing to point out, even if Arcturus had been his father's father. "Lily... she could delude herself sometimes. Saw the best in everyone, even if it wasn't there." Snape, Pettigrew, probably others that Sirius didn't know about.

"But it was there most of the time, wasn't it?" Arcturus asked. "Or she made it be there. Regulus could do that, on his good days. My brother, that is. Your's didn't seem to have the knack for it the same way. He wasn't willing to push hard enough."

"He can't have been that bad at it, he got you involved in all this, didn't he?" Sirius asked, before he realized that Arcturus might take it as some kind of insult.

"He didn't have to push me at all," Arcturus said. "He did the exact opposite. Hid what he was doing for as long as he could and then he kept trying to talk me out of getting too involved."

"That's how you push some people," Sirius said. It had always been the best way to get Peter to help with anything. Although, with Peter, the trick was usually to get him to stop because he was rarely much help. "Speaking of Regulus, you wanted to go through his things."

"You should finish eating," Arcturus said. "You missed breakfast and you're obviously malnourished. And at some point you should write a letter to Harry's current guardians, explaining that you've been officially cleared off all charges and would like to arrange a visit with them."

Sirius blinked, his brain taking a few seconds to catch up with his ears. Surely, his pureblood, _Slytherin_ grandfather had not just suggested that he extend old-fashioned courtesy to a couple of muggles. "I'm full," Sirius said, even though he wasn't. He'd gotten used to being hungry in Azkaban and he had already waited all night to look through Regulus's things. "And I don't really think I need to write a letter to Harry's guardians to let them know I'm coming."

"And if you show up when they aren't there?" Arcturus asked. He sounded more amused than anything else, as though Sirius was going to lose this argument no matter what he did and it was only a matter of seeing how he tried to talk his way out of it.

"I'll wait until they get back," Sirius said. It occurred to him that he didn't actually know where Lily's sister had lived. Remus probably would, because he was well, Remus, so Sirius would just have to wait for him to finally respond to the letter.

"And if they're on holiday on the Continent and will be gone for a fortnight?" Arcturus asked. "I have no doubt that you're stubborn enough to spend the entire time standing on their doorstep, but Healer Shacklebolt would have my head if I let you do it. You need food and rest right now, not weeks outdoors with no shelter."

"It's March," Sirius said. "Nobody goes on long holidays in March. Harry's probably in school." That had been something Lily had told him. Muggle schools started earlier than Hogwarts, teaching math and writing instead of parents. Or, in the case of the Blacks, tutors.

"Do you know where they live?" Arcturus asked.

"I'm not sure that Primrose is really Lily's sister's name," Sirius admitted. There: a good reason for him not to bother with writing her. "And I have no idea what her last name is, unless it's still Evans. But I think I remember her getting married." Lily had been so worked up about it, mostly because her sister had wanted to have the wedding in April when Lily was a Hogwarts and couldn't come.

"So you don't have any way to contact them," Arcturus said. There was a hint of amusement to his voice, because for some stupid reason he seemed to think that not knowing how to find Harry was _funny_.

"I'm sure Remus will know," Sirius said. "Or Dumbledore." Dumbledore knew everything, and he had been the one to arrange for Harry to go live with his aunt, so he ought to know where she lived.

"And while you're waiting to hear from them, you can write a letter to Lily's sister telling her that you'd like to visit Harry and asking when it would be most convenient for you to drop by," Arcturus said. "I suppose it would probably be politer for you to invite Harry over, but I'm sure his aunt will want to talk to you before letting you run off with her nephew."

"To make sure I didn't escape from Azkaban." That was what a normal parent– using Remus and James's parents as his gauge of normal– would do.

"And that you'll behave in a responsible manner while you're taking care of him. Make him eat his vegetables and keep him from falling off his broomstick." Arcturus flicked his wrist in a fashion that seemed to indicate that the details weren't important. "If all the things Regulus said about James Potter were true, then he wasn't someone I would trust to watch my young children for more than a couple of hours, so being his best friend isn't much of a recommendation."

"He made me Harry's godfather," Sirius said. "He trusted me to take care of Harry if anything happened to him and Lily." It was a poor retort and Sirius could think of half a dozen witty responses from 'And you've done such a bang-up job, haven't you' to 'I remember you saying that Harry's parent's wanted him to live with Lily's sister.'

Arcturus said none of them. He only sighed, as though there had been some other, better reaction he had wanted from Sirius.

"I'll write Dumbledore too," Sirius said. It was a good idea anyway, simply because Remus might not be up to writing for a couple of days. "I'm sure that he'd be happy to tell Lily's sister what a good caretaker I am."

Arcturus snorted, evidently finding Sirius's remark funny for some reason. "He was your headmaster. He ought to know better than anyone, except perhaps your parents, how much trouble you are."

"I think McGonagall would know best," Sirius said. At least where it came to actual trouble, rather than simply having his own brain. "She was my head of house and had to deal with _everything_ I got into." Or at least, everything big.

"I'm surprised you're not asking her for a letter of introduction," Arcturus said. His voice was light, and Sirius thought that he might be teasing. Or rather, trying to tease. None of the Blacks, with the exception of Sirius himself, seemed to understand how it was really supposed to work, the line between funny and hurtful.

"People stopped writing letters of introduction a hundred years ago," Sirius replied. Normal people, that was. Some of the crazier purebloods, the ones still attached to the 'old ways' probably did. It was just another way to make themselves feel superior.

"No, they only dropped off in Britain," Arcturus said. "There aren't enough people to bother with it here. Even if you haven't met someone by the time you've finished Hogwarts you've almost certainly heard of them. It was different in America."

"They aren't _that_ suspicious there, are they?" Sirius had only a vague idea of what life was like in America, but they had been mostly untouched by Grindewald's War and the entire mess with You-Know-Who. What did they have to worry about from strangers?

"Lucretia and I were studying thunderbirds," Arcturus said. "Lots of travel, much of it through places muggles frequented... and there's always the risk that someone else would make off with your research."

"How many other people were out there studying thunderbirds?"

"Not just thunderbirds." Arcturus curled his lip up as though he were trying to work his way around a delicate topic. "There have been some, I would say recent but I'm sure this has been going on since the beginning of time, instances where unscrupulous persons have 'borrowed' others reports and then published them as their own."

"Sounds like a Slytherin thing to do," Sirius said, half a second before he remembered that he was currently talking to a Slytherin. "By which I mean that, um–" This was embarrassing. Sirius was a Gryffindor. He wasn't supposed to be brave, not afraid of offending Slytherins, even if he was currently living in one's house. And if he had to be afraid he certainly should be able to avoid showing it.

Arcturus chuckled. "It is a rather Slytherin thing to do. Though I suppose I know a few Ravenclaws who wouldn't have been above it," he said. "The catch is that when you get caught stealing research, you're in for a world of trouble when it gets out."

"When?" If Sirius could remember anything about the Slytherins in school, it was how little they got caught. Usually, when he and James had gotten into fights with Slytherins, they had both ended up in detention, while the Slytherins had lost nothing more than a couple of house points.

"If you one were to steal a single discovery, one would probably get away with it," Arcturus said. There was something in his matter that suggested he had thought this all though once as an exercise in Slytherin sneakiness."But very few single discoveries are enough to keep one happily fed and clothed for a lifetime, especially if there are any children to be cared for. Being around any one of those at the right time to make off with the evidence is a matter of luck, not planning. You'd have to take credit for a number of things you hadn't done, which at the very least means waiting for someone else to do all the work, making off with their notes, and then either killing or putting a memory charm on them so that they can't complain about it. If they have a research partner, have done any demonstrations, or know more than you about their discovery, it becomes much harder. For someone living off of stolen research, it's a matter of when, not if."

"If stealing research is such a bad idea, why was anyone afraid you were going to do it?" Sirius asked. He had always been a bit cagey around Slytherins on principle, but the older Aurors had all frowned at that as immaturity. Besides, there wouldn't be any Slytherins in America.

"Just because it's a bad idea doesn't mean that no one will try," Arcturus said. "And they might get away with it for a little bit. Long enough to make things difficult for someone who was relying on their discoveries to pay the bills."

There was a crack, and it took half a second for Sirius to recognize it as a house elf apparating. It was probably time for her to start making lunch.

Or not, because the elf held something out towards Sirius, something that Sirius would have thought was a letter if it was being delivered by an owl instead of a house elf. "Mimsy has a letter for Master Sirius," the house elf announced.

Sirius took the letter from her, holding it out as though it were a Howler, even though he knew it wasn't. The envelope was cream instead of red and it had the name 'Sirius Black' written on it in familiar handwriting that Sirius couldn't quite place. "I don't think this is from Remus."

"Very nice." Going off the sound of Arcturus's voice, he didn't care much. It shouldn't have been a surprise, considering that Sirius had said he would be leaving as soon as Remus was able to host him, but it stung a bit all the same. "Aren't you forgetting something?"

Sirius looked over at his grandfather, at a loss as to what the man could possibly want from him. Arcturus looked down at the house elf, who turned a pair of golf ball sized eyes onto Sirius with what might have been an expression of pleading, if there hadn't been something accusatory about the way the corners crinkled.

"Thank you, Mimsy," Sirius said, hoping that he had remembered the name properly.

"Master Sirius is very welcome," Mimsy said with a bow, before disappearing with a crack.

Sirius turned his attention back to the letter. He didn't recognize the seal, either, although the letter actually had one rather than the blob of wax people normally used to hold personal letters shut. "Wonder why an owl didn't drop it off," he muttered to himself as he cracked the seal.

"It's a holdover from when Lycoris lived here," Arcturus said. "She kept a number of pets, most of which viewed owls as a tasty snack and took precautions to make sure that most owls would drop off their letters outside the property."

"Most owls?" Sirius asked. Off the top of his head he couldn't think of a way to do that, but he was sure that logically, a spell to redirect owls would redirect all owls.

"I never found out exactly how it worked, but the gist of it was that owls are bred to be able to overcome these kinds of obstacles, and they're getting better all the time." Arcturus frowned. "From the way she went on about it, I'm surprised her spell still misdirects any owls, but then, Lycoris always did have a tendency to be overly dramatic."

Sirius forwent commenting in favor of opening his letter.

Dear Sirius,

I am deeply sorry that you were unjustly incarcerated. I feel that I have some blame for this, as I failed to ensure that you received a fair trial. It has come to my attention that you were released from St. Mungo's into your grandfather's custody yesterday, and I thought it would be best to inform you of two things.

First, spells are in place to ensure that while Harry Potter lives with his blood relatives he is out of reach of those who would wish him harm. For this reason, I must ask that you refrain from taking Harry to live with you, although I am sure you wish to visit him.

Second, Remus Lupin is currently employed doing some undercover work for me and is not capable of receiving mail at this time. I will let him know of your innocence at the earliest opportunity.

Sincerely,

Albus Dumbledore

P.S. Petunia Dursley lives at Number 4 Privet Drive, Little Whinging, Surrey.

"It's from Dumbledore," Sirius said. "Apparently Lily's sister is named Petunia Dursley." He tried not to think too hard about what kind of undercover work Remus could be doing for Dumbledore. The Order couldn't still be operational, could it? After all, You-Know-Who had been gone for eight years, surely his followers weren't still stirring up trouble.

"Excellent," Arcturus said. "I shall write her a letter letting her know that we'll drop by on Thursday."

Sirius grimaced. He was not entirely sure what about that he didn't like, if it was the letter itself or the way that Arcturus just announced that he was writing it like it was his choice what they did even though Sirius was Harry's godfather, and that uncertainty made it difficult to come up with a suitable retort.

"I don't suppose it has to be Thursday," Arcturus said. Sirius had a feeling that it was as close to an apology as he was going to get. "I thought that tomorrow might be a little early. They might have something else planned."

"They might have something else planned for Thursday," Sirius said. They might have something else planned for the entire week for all Arcturus knew, so if he was so concerned with politeness, why didn't he _ask_ when they could visit?

"Then they can politely decline and suggest some other time for us to visit," Arcturus said. "Really, Sirius, are you being contrary for the sake of contrariness now?"

"I am not," Sirius said automatically. "I can write my own letter, thank you very much." Or he could not write a letter and say he did. That was by far the most appealing option at the moment.

"Be sure to give it to Mimsy to post when you've finished it," Arcturus said, with a sly sort of smile that made Sirius think he knew what Sirius was planning to do. "In the meantime, you've finished eating and you did promise to take me to Grimmauld Place today."

"After I write my letter for the Dursleys," Sirius said. As much as he wanted to look through Regulus's things, the fact that Arcturus wanted him to do it was enough for Sirius to stall. It was a childish sort of vengeance, he knew, but he was prepared to take any little victories he could get. He was likely to get few enough chances to one-up Arcturus in the next few weeks. "Mimsy," he called loudly enough to echo through he entire house.

The house elf materialized directly in front of him, holding a feather duster and scowling. "And what does Master Sirius want now?" she asked.

Sirius thought that was a bit rude of her, seeing as he hadn't asked her for anything yet. "Parchment, ink, and a quill," Sirius said.

Mimsy stared at him, tapping her foot in a manner that suggested she was annoyed.

"Please," Sirius added, remembering Arcturus's insistence that he be polite to the house elf.

"Mimsy would be delighted." And just like that, the house elf was gone.

Sirius turned to Arcturus, thinking for half a second, before deciding that he was done being polite. "Go someplace else. I don't like people looking over my shoulder while I'm writing." Truthfully, it had never bothered him much in school, at least not that Sirius could remember, but he had no desire for Arcturus's commentary on whatever he wrote for Petunia Dursley.

Knowing Sirius's writing skills, it was likely to be 'Dear Mrs. Dursley, I'm coming to visit Harry on Thursday and three in the afternoon. Sincerely, Sirius Black', but he would pretend to think about it more. Both to annoy Arcturus and because he should probably write more than that. Harry was going to want to know why he hadn't bothered to visit in over eight years.

Of course, he was going to visit Harry on Thursday, so he could tell him all that then. Maybe bring him something, as a sort of apology for all those years missed. What kinds of things did nine year-olds like? More specifically, what kind of things did nine year-olds like that Sirius could give to a muggle household without getting arrested for violating the Statute of Secrecy?

Another crack and the house elf had appeared again. She sat the supplies Sirius had requested on the table with a little bow that somehow looked insolent, before straitening up to stare at Sirius's hands.

"Thank you, Mimsy," Sirius said, hoping those were the magic words that would make her go away. He'd take Arcturus's commentary on his letter over some freaky house elf's. He looked around the room, just to make sure Arcturus had left.

He hadn't, of course, but he had retreated to the other end of the kitchen. That would have to be enough.

Dear Mrs. Dursley, Sirius wrote. He then added, and Mr. Dursley, because he thought that Petunia's husband might resent being left out.

He paused for a second, trying think of what to write next.

"Are you going to write anything, or are you just going to stare at the parchment?" Sirius glared at Arcturus, who was still standing at the far end of the kitchen.

"I'm writing just fine," he said. He added the line, I'm Harry's godfather and I'd like to come visit him on Thursday at four o'clock, to his letter. He really hoped that the Dursley's knew about owl post. They might panic and frighten off whatever poor owl got set to deliver their letter if they didn't. "Do you reckon we should send the letter through the muggle post?"

Arcturus looked rather bemused by the suggestion. Perhaps he hadn't known that muggle post existed before. "Is it faster than owl post?"

"Probably not," Sirius admitted. Especially because, as neither he nor Arcturus knew how muggle post worked, they would have to take it to the owl post office and pay to have someone else sort it into the muggle mail.

"Then there isn't much point in doing it the muggle way, is there?" Arcturus asked. "The Dursley's are housing a wizard, they know about our world and young Harry might as well be exposed to our customs as early as possible."

"You do have an owl of your own, don't you?" Sirius asked. Not every wizard, or even every wizarding family, did. Owls didn't need that much care, but they were a bit expensive, and there was always the risk that you would get attached only to have the bird die on you during a particularly harsh winter trip or something. Walburga had used that as her excuse for not buying Sirius an owl of his own when he left for Hogwarts.

"No," Arcturus said. "It wouldn't be advisable, with Lycoris's spellwork still hanging around this place. What I do have is an agreement with the local post office. Mimsy can take your letter over there and have it posted for us, with no more trouble than sending out an actual owl."

"Right." Sirius had already looked down at his letter, to where he had written Thursday at four o'clock. A small piece of him thought that, if the letter was going to have to go through the owl office anyway, why not send it the muggle way, and avoid any difficulty. The rest of him was torn between worry that the letter wouldn't reach Harry before Thursday, and a strong desire not to have to ask for another piece of parchment.

"If you need help with–"

"I don't need help!" Sirius shouted. "I need you to go away!"

Arcturus paled, as though Sirius had announced that never wanted to see him again or something, but he stepped out the kitchen door anyway. Though, from the sound of things, he had resumed pacing just out of eyeshot.

Sirius resolved to ignore him. He added, If you are unavailable at this time please let me know by return owl. He wasn't sure how the Dursley's were going to do that if they didn't have an owl of their own, but perhaps the post owl would hang around long enough for them to write a reply.

Sincerely, Sirius Black, he finished. "There. I'm done. Are you happy?"

"Very."


	4. Grimmauld Place

Grimmauld Place was much as Sirius remembered it. The décor had not changed at all, although the entryway was coated in a thick layer of dust. Walburga must have outlived the house elf then, or perhaps the house elf had outlived her and then crawled into the airing cupboard and died from lack of anything better to do.

"I don't think there's much point in searching anywhere other than Regulus's room," Arcuturus said. "Although I should warn you that he claimed to have put up some protective hexes on his door."

"I know," Sirius said. He had run afoul of them often enough since Regulus had started at Hogwarts and started learning real spells. The first couple of years had been bad enough, and the doorknob had only shocked the people who touched it then. "They might have worn off when Regulus died, but I wasn't planning on opening the door with my hand just in case."

"I wouldn't count on that keeping you safe." Sirius wasn't sure quite what to make of that. Arcturus didn't sound like he was trying to be funny, nor like he was at all reluctant to search the room.

"That's what you're along for," Sirius said. "To haul me back to St. Mungo's after I start convulsing." Whatever spells Regulus had put on his door couldn't be all that bad, he lived the last months of his life with his mother and the house elf, neither of whom Regulus was likely to risk seriously injuring.

"Why don't you let me open the door." It was a statement rather than a question, but Sirius wasn't eager enough to expose himself to whatever Regulus's idea of personal security to complain about it.

"I should warn you in advance that I was never very good at healing spells even before Azkaban," Sirius said. At this point he doubted that Arcturus would recognize anything as funny, but joking was always how he had dealt with stress. He stepped forward into the house, ready to be done with standing on the doorstep talking.

In his haste to get up to Regulus's room, Sirius had forgotten about one specific piece of décor: the ugly troll-leg umbrella stand that stood by the foot of the stairs. He knocked it over and the resulting sound was loud enough to make Arcturus wince.

That was when the screaming started. "Who's there? Kreacher! Kreacher! Intruders in the house! Drive them out! Kreacher!"

It was Walburga Black's voice, and for the briefest moment Sirius thought that the Ministry had made a mistake. Walburga hadn't died, she had merely become housebound, and she was still sitting up in her rooms, being waited on by that elf, who had had no need to clean the entryway since his mistress no longer visited it.

Then Sirius came to his senses. He had worked in the DMLE, and while he had never been involved in missing persons cases, he knew that someone couldn't be declared legally dead (without a body) unless they had been missing for seven years. She would have had to have vanished not long after he had been imprisoned and declared dead a very short time ago, in order for that to be the case.

Sirius had paused at the foot of the stairs, frozen, as he thought this all out, and when he shook himself loose from his stupor, Arcturus had already passed him, heading up the stairs and down the hall to what Sirius hoped was the source of the screaming.

"It's a portrait," Arcturus shouted as the screaming changed to, "You! Thief of my son! Purveyor of false wisdom and–"

"Shut up you old hag!" Sirius shouted as he ran up the stairs. The portrait was fixed to the wall at the top of the stairs, and if Sirius had not already known it was of Walburga, he never would have guessed. His mother looked to have aged forty years in the time between her husband's funeral (where Sirius had caught glimpse of her when he had briefly dropped by) and the time she had sat for her portrait. She really did look like a hag now.

There was the crackling pop of a house-elf apparating, and Kreacher appeared directly under the screaming portrait, brandishing a frying pan as though it were a deadly weapon instead of a cooking implement.

Sirius growled, fighting the urge to hex the stupid creature into oblivion and move on to his mother's portrait. It would save them the trouble of having to put up with the house-elf and would be extremely satisfying besides. The only real problem was that Arcturus was likely to take it as a sign that Sirius had turned violent.

"Go away Kreacher," Sirius snapped, more out of instinct than anything else. The stupid thing had always been rather resistant to his orders, and after he returned from his first year of Hogwarts the house elf had refused to obey Sirius altogether. He had 'punished' himself for it the way house elves usually did, but he had always done it around Walburga who would tell him to stop and punish Sirius for whatever he had tried to get Kreacher to do.

The house elf scowled, swaying as though he was trying to resist some sort of force attempting to knock him over, and then vanished with anther crack.

Sirius turned to look at Arcturus, as a way to reassure himself that he had in fact seen a house elf and not merely hallucinated his childhood nemesis.

"You inherited the elf along with the house," Arcturus shouted over the portrait's screaming. "He might know something about Regulus."

Sirius scowled. Another source of information about his brother was welcome, but did it really have to be that blasted elf? Getting useful information out of him would be like trying to pull a troll's teeth. And that was assuming Regulus had even told it anything important in the first place.

Meanwhile, Arcturus had taken hold of the curtains on either side of the portrait and appeared to be trying to draw them over it.

Portrait-Waburga's eyes widened even further than they were already, and for the barest instant she was stunned into silence. Sirius could only assume that she had finally noticed him. Then the screaming started up again, "Shame of my flesh, befouling these hallowed halls of my fathers–"

"This was my house before you ever lived in it, you insufferable harpy," Arcturus snapped. His knuckles were turning white from how hard he was tugging at the curtains and Sirius reasoned that there had to be some sort of force holding them open, no doubt controlled by the painting.

Not having any desire to listen to Walburga's screeching for any longer, Sirius took hold of the curtains and pulled them together. There was a moment of resistance before they snapped shut, closing over the portrait and quieting its occupant.

"Mum doesn't like you much either," Sirius said. It wasn't really a surprise, since Orion had fought with his father badly enough to lock him out of his ancestral home, but it made Sirius happy all the same.

"I think she may have blamed me for Regulus's death," Arcturus said. One of his shoulders hitched up, as though he was expecting a blow of some kind. "I don't _know_ because I never spoke to her afterwards and she never wrote me. At least, not any letters that reached me. The benefit to having a house that owls can't reach is that the Howlers all burn to ash long before you see them."

"The first few days of Hogwarts were awful," Sirius said. "She kept sending me Howlers, even though Dumbledore and the board of governors had already told her that I couldn't be resorted. I don't know what she thought she was going to accomplish." In retrospect, that was the first sign of the Black madness that had come to destroy Walburga's life, judging from the way her portrait behaved. One of the seventh years finally came up with a modified bubble charm that would dampen the sound."

"Do you still remember it?" Arcturus asked. What use he could possibly have for a spell that soundproofed a sphere the size of a quaffle, even if it did work on things magically altered to resist the work of silencing spells, Sirius had no idea.

"No," Sirius said. He couldn't even remember the seventh year who had come up with it. "I think Remus knew it. He used it a couple of times when I'd done something impressive enough to warrant a Howler from home."

"I would have expected you to get those rather frequently, considering some of the things Regulus said you and your friends got up to," Arcturus said.

"Mother found out about the spell almost as soon as the seventh year came up with it." Personally Sirius had always suspected Narcissa to be the one who had told her, but it could have been any of the Slytherins. "That gave her a reason to stop the 'How Dare You Be Sorted Into Gryffindor' set, and McGonagall never wrote home about any of my misbehavior unless it was _really_ bad."

"Because she was sensitive to your feelings or because the rest of the school didn't want to hear everything you'd done shouted over breakfast?"

"Probably a bit of both," Sirius admitted. Especially since there had been some things, the mess with Snape in fifth year came to mind, that the entire school shouldn't have been informed of. "I think she also figured that I didn't care much what my parents thought and telling them was just going to be a waste of parchment."

"And it didn't matter much after you ran off to live with the Potters," Arcturus said. He sounded remarkably blasé about that, as though he didn't care at all that Sirius had abandoned his family to run off with one of his blood traitor friends from Gryffindor, even if it was the pureblood one. "I imagine she was writing to _them_."

She did, although she really didn't have to. Dorea Potter had started including Sirius in the chewing out letters and holiday punishments in third year, after Sirius had gotten another rash of Howlers for having the audacity to take Muggle Studies. "Right." Sirius pointed at the door ahead of them, with a note saying 'Do Not Enter Without the Express Permission of Regulus Arcturus Black' on it. "I remember you saying that you were going to open that."

Arcturus pulled out his wand and waved it over the door, silently casting some spell that Sirius couldn't recognize. It was possible that it was intended to counteract whatever Regulus's normal protections were, handed over for just such an event as this. The door slid open silently, revealing a room that had changed very little in the years since Sirius had seen it last.

It was still insufferably neat, with little other than the photos by the bed and the clippings on the wall to show that it was a child's bedroom (even if Regulus had not really been much of a child anymore by the time he had died) rather than a showpiece of some kind.

Sirius walked over to the newspaper clippings, having never seen them up close before. The last time he had gotten a glimpse of the inside of Regulus's room had been shortly before he ran away from home and he had been ejected both quickly and forcefully. "These are all about You-Know-Who," Sirius said. He could not keep the distaste from his voice. Sure, setting up some kind of shrine to the Dark Lord would keep suspicion away from Regulus being a traitor, but Regulus booby-trapped his bedroom door. Who would see it?

Arcturus went over to the clippings, examining them more closely than Sirius had the stomach to. "They're old. The most recent is dated November 25, 1978. Still, they might be important." Arcturus began carefully peeling each of the clippings off of the wall. "You could start going through his desk drawers. That seems like a better place to hide something."

Sirius opened the top drawer. Ink, spare quills, a couple of chocolate frog cards. Funny, Sirius hadn't known that Regulus collected those. "Do Agrippa and Nicholas Flamel have any significance to you?"

"Nicholas Flamel created the Philosopher's Stone," Arcturus said. He turned away from the clippings, now mostly off the wall. "Why? Did Regulus have books on them or something?"

"Chocolate frog cards," Sirius said.

Arcturus's face twisted into a sort of grimace, as though he was trying very hard not to show how stupid he thought Sirius was. "I doubt chocolate frog cards are going to mean much of anything."

"Unless they aren't really chocolate frog cards." Sirius drew his wand and began to poke at the cards, not casting any spells but feeling for any sort of magical aura that the cards might have.

"Was that supposed to do something?" Arcturus asked. There was a sort of disquiet in the way he was looking at Sirius, as though he was afraid that all those years in Azkaban had driven him round the bend and Sirius had just done a very good job of hiding it until now.

"It'll let me know if the cards have a spell on them," Sirius explained. At least that was the theory of it, Sirius had never quite managed to make it work out. "James did it all the time." Well, twice that Sirius could remember, but Sirius remembered little enough from seventh year that it might as well have been.

"Are you absolutely sure he wasn't joking?" Now, that Sirius thought about it, it sounded rather likely. It wasn't exactly James's usual humor, but it was right up Remus's alley. He could have put James up to it.

"It was worth trying," Sirus said, to cover up his own uncertainty about the matter. He dropped the cards back in the drawer and opened up the next one. There was something a little off about the size and when Sirius put his hand down inside it there was a full four inches between the bottom and the end of the drawer. "Jackpot. This one has some sort of false bottom."

"Not a magical one?" Arcturus asked. He had left the newspaper clippings entirely, instead hovering over Sirus's shoulder.

"No. He must have made this when he was young." And had never bothered to improve it. Extension charms were tricky, but not too tricky for a N.E.W.T charms student, especially not one as smart as Regulus had been.

"Or it's some kind of trap," Arcturus said. Sirius would have put that even past normal Slytherin paranoia, but Regulus had been up to some serious stuff the year before he died. "He doesn't even have anything in that drawer to hide how much smaller the inside is."

Sirius flicked his wand at the fake bottom, lifting the latch and opening it. A pile of dusty parchment sat inside, covered in a messy sort of handwriting, too close to illegible to Regulus's. Sirius pulled the stack out of the drawer and looked them over. They appeared to be letters, sent to Regulus by one Olivia Brighton. Sirius could vaguely remember a girl by that name, a Gryffindor half-blood in the year below him. Why would Regulus have been writing her?

Searching for some kind of answer, Sirius started reading the letter itself. _My darling Reggie, how I have longed to fall into your embrace again. The days pass so slowly without you by my side. My only consolation is my certainty that you feel this separation as keenly as I do._

Sirius had to bite back a laugh.

"Can you read any of that?" Arcturus asked.

"It's a love letter," Sirius said. "Looks like Regulus had a girlfriend."

"What?" The expression on Arcturus's face was the perfect mix of shock, horror, and indignation. Sirius wished he had a camera. He should probably buy one, both for situations such as this and because he was going to want proper pictures of Harry, not only muggle ones that stood motionless as a corpse and creepily stared at whoever was viewing them.

"I suppose it's a bit of a shock." Sirius turned a bit, so that he could hide how wide his smile was from his grandfather. "I know you thought that Regulus told you everything, but–"

"I didn't think– He's not stupid enough to hide something like this." Sirius snuck a peek at Arcturus's face. He no longer looked outraged, but rather pensive. "I was preparing to fake his death and set him up with a false identity in America, with the idea that he would never return to England or meet many people from his old life. Hiding a romance would be completely counter-productive."

"Maybe this is what he got into," Sirius said. It made sense, from the perspective of a lovesick sixteen year-old, the kind of thing James would have done for Lily before his years working for the Order had instilled a sense of practicality in him. "He didn't want to leave his girlfriend, so he told you that he had 'found something important' and couldn't go through with your plan."

"It would have been easier to move the girl out to America with him. They could settle down and live happily ever after without having to worry about the Dark Lord or his plots." Arcturus frowned, seeming to have thought of something new. "I suppose if the girl was still in Hogwarts..."

"She wasn't," Sirius said. He wasn't sure what Olivia Brighton had been doing, but it hadn't been anything special either. "She was a half-blood. Maybe he thought that you wouldn't approve."

"He was running off to America to spend the rest of his life as Robert Brown, why should I care who he was writing love letters to?" Sirius didn't quite believe that Arcturus really would have been fine with his precious grandson marrying a half-blood, but he let the matter drop. No doubt Arcturus thought that Regulus and Olivia's relationship had been nothing serious. "And he was living with me, how did I not see him sending them off?"

"He might have only gotten together with her during his sixth year." That explanation didn't convince even Sirius. Olivia had graduated from Hogwarts two years before that, leaving Regulus little time to meet her and decide he wanted a relationship. Especially when he had spent the proceeding summer holed up with his grandfather. "Or he's sneakier than you think."

"He was pretending to gather information for the Death Eaters while secretly plotting to flee the country and taking six N.E.W.T. classes. He wouldn't have had time for a relationship." Arcturus felt around the bottom of the drawer. "Maybe he's sneakier than _you_ think."

Arcturus waved his wand over the drawer, casting what Sirius thought was the same spell he had cast on the door. The bottom popped open. "He put a secret drawer inside a secret drawer?" Sirius said. Regulus had taken paranoia even farther than Orion.

"It's an old trick, but a good one." A hint of a smile crossed Arcuturs's face as he explained, "Two layers of security. Underneath the first one is something that could be reasonably expected to have been deliberately hidden, in this case 'love letters' from a half-blood. Anyone looking would assume that they had found out what was hidden and stop looking, leaving the important secrets hidden."

Just the way Sirius had been about to. "Well, he wasn't clever enough to fool you." Which was probably a good thing, because this was certainly the jackpot. He reached inside the drawer and pulled out a small book, the cover and spine empty of any writing. Sirius flipped it open. "This is in code."

What kind of code, exactly, Sirius had no idea. The book was filled with numbers, ten digits each. Each number was probably a word, but there was no key that Sirius could see. Regulus wouldn't have been stupid enough to leave his in the same place as the document he was trying to code, anyway.

"There has to be a key around here somewhere." Arcturus looked over at Regulus's bookshelf, which was as full as a bookshelf could be without looking untidy. "Probably one of the books. All he would have to do was pick one to use. No need to leave an incriminating roll of parchment with nothing but words and numbers on it."

Sirius looked down at the note. Ten digits. Digits one, three, and six were usually zeros. "Maybe more than one book. He's got mostly technical stuff–" That was what Sirius remembered of Regulus, at least. "–he might need more than one book to have all the words he wants to use. That would explain all the zeros. First two digits are the book, next three are the chapter and the last five are the word number in the chapter."

Arcturus frowned. "That's going to make this _very_ hard." Sirius thought it was going to be more like impossible. Regulus had at least fifty books on that shelf and any one of them could be any one of books numbered one through... sixty-five was the highest number Sirius could see. "Perhaps the numbers are where they're listed on the shelf. What's the first one?"

Sirius thought it just as likely that they were wrong way around, because there was no sense in Regulus making this any easier on people snooping through his things, but he read the first number out anyway. "0102701117"

Arcuturus flipped open the first book and scanned the first page. "No good. This book only has sixteen chapters."

"Try the last book in on the bottom shelf," Sirius said. If that wasn't the case, they might as well start looking for a slip of parchment with a numbered list of all of Regulus's books on it. There was no way Regulus had all sixty-five books memorized.

"Squamous," Arcturus said. "Not likely to be the first word in any sort of sentence. On reflection, I don't think the book order means much of anything. He can't have brought all these books to him with Hogwarts, let alone in any specific order."

Sirius started rummaging through the other desk drawers, looking for Regulus's key.

"Sirius, what are you doing?"

"He must have written down the book numbers," Sirius said. "So that he could remember them properly." Sirius had the sudden, awful thought that maybe this entire book was a red herring. Regulus had just written a bunch of random numbers in a book to distract anyone who might come looking through his things. It wouldn't have taken more than an hour or two.

"He wouldn't have needed a list to remember a few book numbers," Arcturus's voice was scathing, and Sirius suspected he was biting back cruel words about Sirius's intelligence.

"For sixty-five different books?" Sirius scanned through the pages again. "No. Sixty- _seven_ books." Sirius started counting the books on the shelf. If there weren't at least sixty-seven, then the first two digits couldn't refer to books.

"Sixty-seven?" Arcturus's lips pursed, as though there was some meaning behind the number that he couldn't quite remember. "Why would he need _that_ many? Surely he could have done it with ten or eleven, if he picked them carefully. Then he would be able to remember them all."

"With ten, he would have only needed the first digit for the book number." Which would have made the code a little harder to figure out. Not to mention more compact and easier to read. "Why go to all the bother of putting everything in code, anyway? Especially one that he would have to decode in order to use his notes?" Because it appealed to his personal paranoia was the easy answer, but Sirius didn't want to believe it. He didn't want Regulus to have ended up like Orion, even if he had more reason.

"He might not have intended to reread them," Arcturus said. "Writing something down does tend to help one remember it. And the process of coding it might have helped him slow down enough to think it out properly."

Sirius's heart sank. He had heard about that, in whispers about some of his older relatives, but he had never noticed Regulus having any problems with it. But, a nagging voice whispered in the back of Sirius's mind, he hadn't paid Regulus much attention once he left home. "Did he often have difficulty with that?"

"He was never truly manic, if that's what you're asking." Arcturus's mouth thinning into a wry sort of frown. "Not compared to either of my siblings. But he could get overly excited sometimes, when he was working on something, to the point where he needed to talk things out in order for them to be comprehensible even to himself."

"He was a bit young to have symptoms." Sirius had done a little reading, after the incident with the fire crabs that had very nearly landed Aunt Cassie in an Azkaban cell, enough to know that most sufferers of the 'family sickness' didn't start showing any signs until their mid-twenties at the earliest.

"He was under a lot of stress." Arcturus looked back over at the books, appearing to scan the titles for anything that might show some clue into Regulus's mental state during those years. Sirius saw nothing particularly indicative– if Regulus had any mental or emotional problems he hadn't turned to books to solve them. "That can make people act funny. I didn't think much of it at the time."

Sirius felt a flash of anger at the calm was Arcturus was relying this, as though the old man hadn't given any thought at all to how Regulus was coping with things until long after he was dead. "You didn't think that maybe, he could use some help with this? A calming potion or something?" The books that Sirius had read had all been rather vague about treating the condition, but Sirius had only skimmed them.

"There wasn't anything I could have given him, at least not long term, that wouldn't have had side effects at least as bad as a little difficulty concentrating," Arcturus snapped. "We're getting off topic."

Sirius nodded, not quite trusting himself to speak. Logically, there was no reason for him to be angry at Arcturus for having decided to ignore any mental problems that Regulus may or may not have had when Sirius had never noticed it himself, but he was angry. Arcturus had been living with Regulus! He should have noticed that something was wrong and then gone and done something about it, instead of waiting years and years to mention it to anyone.

"I think the question of what code Regulus was using is something best left for a later time, after we've had time to think it over." Arcturus tapped at the edge of the bookcase thoughtfully. "Unless you think the house elf would know it."

"Regulus wouldn't have shared his extra secret code with that creature." He had always been rather odd about the beast, true, even going so far as to call Kreacher his 'friend' in the years after Sirius had started Hogwarts but before Regulus had, but he wouldn't have shared that. Not when any other member of the family would be able to simply order the elf to give up Regulus's secrets.

"He might know more about where Regulus went," Arcturus said. "Regulus was living here when he disappeared. It's likely that the house elf would have noticed something in the weeks leading up to that."

"It's a house elf, not you," Sirius said a bit more viciously than he probably should have. "Regulus didn't tell it anything and it's not smart enough to figure anything out on its own." Kreacher did have a sort of animal cunning to him, a knack for knowing when Sirius was doing something his mother had forbidden, but that wouldn't have helped here.

If it had– well, if Walburga had known that her precious obedient son was going to run off an get herself killed, she would have stopped him.

"Right." There was something slightly off in the way Arcturus said that. It made Sirius think he was only agreeing to humor him.

"I'm not going crazy, that's how it is," Sirius snapped. "Wanting the house elf to be able to explain everything won't change what happened."

Arcturus took a deep breath. "It's not that I think the elf would be able to _explain_ anything, so much as that I think he might have seen something that, with the knowledge we already have of Regulus's activities, might hint at where he went or what he intended to accomplish."

"Regulus intended to stop You-Know-Who from conquering Britain and turning the Ministry of Magic into his personal hit squad." Sirius knew that wasn't what Arcturus meant, that his grandfather was thinking shorter term goals, but Sirius didn't care. The little details weren't all that important.

"I know that Gryffindors like to rush into things, but this isn't a problem that you can pound into submission, Sirius. We're going to have to puzzle this out." The corners of Arcturus's lips turned down, just enough so that he was definitely frowning. "I thought you liked puzzles. I remember you spending hours trying to figure out one of the first Sirius's rings. Lucretia started to joke that you were going to be in Ravenclaw."

"Wonderful." Sirius could remember spending hours on various puzzles when he was small, but that was because there was nothing better to do rather than because he really liked them. "Well, the hat said I lacked the 'drive and openness' of a true Ravenclaw, so there isn't any point in wishing things were otherwise." Sirius had, for the first couple of months. Ravenclaw would be a shock, but would not had caused Walburga that same amount of shame. Or so Sirius had thought at the time.

Arcturus sighed. "I was trying to share anecdotes about your childhood, not express disappointment in your sorting. I don't suppose you'd appreciate being told not to take everything so seriously."

There was a pun in there somewhere, if Sirius had been with James and Remus he would have caught it and thrown it out for public consumption, but as it was he couldn't quite grasp the thing.

"Although, that's not really what it is. You seem determined sometimes to take everything as an insult. That's it." A faint sort of smile crossed Arcturus's face, as though he was proud of himself for figuring this out.

"Aren't Slytherins supposed to be good with people things?" Sirius had always figured that should fall under the 'cunning' part of their house. After all, how did they go about manipulating people if they couldn't get along with them.

"I am good with people." Arcturus froze for half a second, probably realizing what he had just said and, more importantly, who he had said it to. "Most of the time. When I don't actually like them very much."

"So I should be flattered by the fact that you seem to have no idea how to avoid insulting me?" That was the sort of thing Sirius would have said years ago, perhaps not in Gryffindor tower, but with the Order of the Phoenix, while gearing up for a particularly difficult or dangerous mission.

"It's preferable to being offended." The words were light enough, but the way Arcturus had gripped the book in his hands suggested that he was actually rather upset.

Sirius wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that, so he settled for shrugging.

"Anyway, unless you want to come back here and look through Regulus's books again, we might as well pack everything up and take it with us." Arcturus grimaced at the bookshelf, no doubt wondering how they were going to carry all of that with them. There was no way to fit it all into Regulus's school trunk and Sirius knew that _he_ hadn't brought any other bags. "Mimsy!"

A crack and the house elf was standing by Arcturus's side. Sirius scowled. That was cheating, as far as he was concerned. Besides the house elf probably had important things to do, like make supper. "Can't you pack up the books yourself?"

Arcturus ignored him. "Mimsy, please move Regulus's books over to my cottage. Keep them in the same order they are now." He looked over the bookshelf. "It might be best to take the entire bookshelf."

"Yes, Master Arcturus," the elf said with a little bow. It was rather sickening the way the elf doted on him and Sirius made a face at her while Arcturus's back was turned.

He received in response an obscene gesture that a house elf shouldn't have known, let alone used.

"If you're done antagonizing Mimsy, then come help me with the rest of this. We should go through his closet, at least."

Sirius shivered at the very idea of that. He knew there was no logical reason for him to do so, Regulus had always valued his books more than his clothes, but going through his dead brother's clothing seemed so much more intrusive than anything he had done so far.

It was easier, Sirius decided, as he started sifting through the line of clean robes hung up in the closet, if he thought of this as the lead up to some kind of prank. Gathering information so that he would have something to tease his little brother about. The love letters would have been wonderful ammunition when he was a teenager.

Or not, because Regulus had written them himself as a blind. Sirius could picture how that would have played out, him spending weeks slyly hinting about Regulus's new love while Regulus made a show of not understanding what he was talking about and the entire debacle finally ending with Sirius charming the 'love letters' to read themselves and stringing them up in the Great Hall.

The very idea of it made Sirius chuckle.

"What's funny?" Arcturus asked, looking up from where he was going through Regulus's underwear drawer.

"Nothing," Sirius said. It was apparently the wrong thing to say, because Arcturus's mouth puckered up as though he had just taken a bite out of a lemon. "I thought of something, that's all."

Arcturus's mouth set into a thin, worried line and Sirius realized that the old man was probably afraid Sirius was going mad, either from his time in Azkaban or simply the bad luck of the Black family in the sanity department. "It was actually funny," Sirius added.

"But you don't care to share it." There was something odd in Arcturus's voice, Sirius couldn't quite tell if it was disappointment or hurt.

"How I would have reacted to finding those love letters back when Regulus was still alive," Sirius said. "That's what I was thinking about."

Arcturus's head cocked to the side. "Yes. I can see why you would find that amusing."

"We would have gotten so much entertainment out of it," Sirius said, because there was no way he wouldn't have let James and Peter and Remus in on the fun even after they had all graduated from Hogwarts. "Remus would have told us to leave the poor kid alone, probably even covered for him if he thought we were being too hard on Reggie, but James would have been right in the thick of it and Peter had an absolute genius streak for–"

 _Peter_. Sirius had spent years in Azkaban thinking about how that rat had sold out Lily and James, had probably sold them all out because that couldn't have been the first information he had passed on to the Death Eaters, and here Sirius was thinking of him as a comrade in arms and partner in crime.

It was only when he caught sight of the fear on Arcturus's face that Sirius realized he had been growling. He broke off, still scowling. "It doesn't matter," Sirius said to himself. "The rat is in Azkaban where he belongs." If anyone deserved to be in that hellhole it was the rat. Sirius took a vindictive sort of pleasure in picturing Pettigrew shivering in a cell with dementors looming over him.

Arcturus shot an incredulous look at Sirius, the I-can't-believe-you-believe-that look Sirius could remember seeing on Regulus's face in the weeks leading up to his running away. "They released you from Azkaban because they couldn't _prove_ that you had betrayed the Potters and blown up a bunch of muggles."

"Yeah. So?" There was something Sirius should be getting out of that, but he was too irritated to bother with stupid Slytherin caginess. Would it kill the old man to say something straight out for once?

"They couldn't _prove_ that Pettigrew had done it either." Sirius had a sudden image: Peter Pettigrew, free and clear at last, off on a beach somewhere sunning himself while Sirius was stuck living with his grandfather.

"So they let him off free?" The idea of it was enough to bring a note of panic to Sirius's voice. Pettigrew could be doing _anything_ , conspiring to bring his master back, and now no one was going to stop him.

"Not exactly." There was a malicious sort of humor in Arcturus's voice, as though something about the situation was very, very funny in a nasty way. "What did he claim happened to him at the trial?"

"He said I turned him into a rat, and he couldn't remember anything that happened after that until he was in Minerva McGonagall's office being turned back into a human." Quite frankly, the fact that anyone believed that load of dung was enough to make Sirius worry about the state of the country. Someone who had been transfigured into a rat and spent eight years as one shouldn't be able to give coherent testimony at a trial only a few days after being turned back into a human.

"Exactly. To my knowledge, he's currently in St. Mungo's, being screened for adverse side-effects to his transformation." Arcturus's mouth twisted into a vicious sort of smile. "He's unlikely to be released any time soon."

Sirius had the good grace not to ask who Arcturus had bribed in order to make sure that happened. "We'll have to make sure we're ready when he gets out. He might try to bring You-Know-Who back." That would be the only way for Pettigrew to regain favor, after having been outed from eight years spent hiding as a rat.

Then again, Pettigrew had spent eight years hiding as a rat instead of conspiring to bring You-Know-Who back to power, so maybe he'd just run off to Australia to escape the controversy that he was sure to be embroiled in the moment he set foot outside the hospital. "Why did no one pitch a fit when you picked me up from the St. Mungo's? There out to have been couple of people from the _Daily Prophet_ at least."

"No one knew that you were leaving," Arcturus said. "The Ministry made a statement that you would be treated in St. Mungo's until you were deemed sane enough to care for yourself properly. They estimated that would be several months at the very least. Add to that, the fact that the trial was rushed, with not very many people attending, and that the only photographs of you are from before you were imprisoned and it's not too surprising that so few people recognized you."

"You mean no one," Sirius said, because no one _had_ recognized him. "Except for Ollivander." Who had been creepy as hell as per norm and probably would have recognized Sirius if he had shown up as Padfoot.

"So I do." Arcturus smiled.

"What are you planning on doing when people show up at your house and want to interview you about me?" Sirius was confident that Arcturus's house was hidden well enough, but he doubted that it would keep some of the more determined reporters, for example Rita Skeeter, at bay for long.

Arcturus's smile turned wry. "I confess I haven't thought about that much. Not very many know where I live and with Mimsy doing the shopping there's no danger of getting accosted whilst out and about. And some of the spells Lycoris left would make unexpected visitors... less inclined to show up unannounced to say the least."

"There isn't anything illegal is there?" Sirius asked, a little worried that some stupid reporter would show up, spring the traps, and get him and Arcturus thrown back in Azkaban again.

"I don't think so. I looked through the legal books and came to the conclusion that a remarkable range of ill effects stay within the realm of 'legal' if they aren't permanent, especially if they aren't set up anyplace people should be poking around."

Sirius blinked, trying to work out the logic of that. He remembered being reamed out by McGonagall fifth year for a mostly harmless booby trap that had been intended to stop the rat from digging through his things without permission and had instead caught a rather traumatized second year. "So if someone from the _Daily Prophet_ shows up and ends up with a nose the size of a watermelon, you simply say 'Oh, I'm so sorry, that was intended to keep the gnomes out' and everything's fine?"

"It's not quite that simple–"

"Only because Slytherins try to make everything more complicated than it really is." Sirius had seen that a little in the Auror Department, where there had been a few Slytherins. Most of them had been very good, the Auror Department didn't let anyone else in, but they had a tendency to take things that were really very simply and complicate them to the point that they could hardly be understood.

"Do you blame everything at fault with the world on Slytherins?" Arcturus turned pale after he had said the words, as though he was afraid that a casual jibe would set Sirius raging.

"Most of it _is_ the fault of Slytherins," Sirius said, and from what he had seen that was true. You-Know-Who was certainly a Slytherin, if he had been to Hogwarts at all, and so were the vast majority of his followers. The only one Sirius could think of who wasn't, was the rat. "We never would have had any of this You-Know-Who business if there hadn't been any Slytherins. And, while they don't do sorting on the Continent, you can't deny that Grindewald would have been a Slytherin if he had gone to school at Hogwarts."

"I'm afraid I can," Arcturus said, without showing the slightest fear at all. "I think that if his parents had elected to send him to Hogwarts at eleven, he would likely have been sorted into Hufflepuff."

"Hufflepuff?" Sirius repeated. From the time he was a small boy he had known that Hufflepuff was the house for duffers not clever or brave or pure enough to get into one of the other houses, and while both the Sorting Hat and his time at Hogwarts had made him rethink that a little, he still couldn't see Hufflepuff producing anyone darker than a Ministry bureaucrat.

"Possibly Ravenclaw, as his early forays into the Dark Arts always struck me as more of an obsession than the result of genuine malice or even as a desire to have an arsenal he could employ against his enemies." There was a distance to Arcturus's gaze, on that made Sirius think he wasn't so much physically present as reliving events that had taken place half a century ago. "Of course, if he had really been sorted into Hufflepuff or even Ravenclaw, that tendency would have been ground out of him, and he probably would have chosen a less violent means to achieve his goals, but there's no guarantee that he could have accomplished his vision peacefully or that he would have been willing to take the time to work things out peacefully."

"You didn't know him personally, did you?" Sirius asked. Even if he hadn't, what he had told Sirius about Regulus and the Death Eaters suggested he might have been involved in Grindewald's War. There had to have been some people from Britain who had been– other than Dumbledore.

"Merlin, no." Arcturus chuckled. "Merely observant. It doesn't hurt that I spent quite a bit of time researching Grindewald's War when I lived in America."

"Why?" Arcturus looked completely dumbstruck by the question and Sirius hastily added, "I don't think you did it for fun, you were trying to get something out of it, and I want to understand what"

"I thought it might be beneficial to compare Grindwald's War, more specifically Grindewald's followers, to the Dark Lord's." Arcturus frowned, his gaze flickering up to the ceiling as though he had seen something up there.

Sirius looked up and saw nothing noteworthy, unless he counted the cobwebs that had been allowed to gather in the corners.

"Which was enlightening, but not all that helpful," Arcturus continued. "I came to the conclusion that, while Grindewald's forces primarily joined him because they actually thought that he was going to make the world a better place, the Death Eaters were mainly motivated by a desire to be the ones running the show after their inevitable victory."

"They lost," Sirius pointed out.

"They thought their victory was inevitable until Halloween 1981, when their supposedly immortal leader was vanquished and they were forced to reevaluate their certainty. At which point they did their very best to vanish into the masonry and were generally quite successful."

"How?" Sirius asked, although he had a few suspicions. They had had enough difficulty at the height of the war trying to get charges to stick, that was part of the reason the Ministry had pushed to allow imprisonment without trial and to give Aurors license to kill. Dead Death Eaters couldn't wiggle out of punishment. "I would have expected them to be tripping over themselves to rat each other out in exchange for clemency."

"There was some of that," Arcturus said. "A slew of trials right after the war, many of them for people who had been incarcerated during the war, and there were several people who made their bid for freedom on naming other Death Eaters. It generally wasn't very effective. Too much hearsay, not enough evidence or reliable ways to determine if someone was actually under the imperious curse."

"Horace Slughorn definitely was," Sirius said. Those memories had remained clear despite Azkaban and Sirius had no doubt that they would remain clear for many more years. The old Potions Master from Hogwarts, rather dazed and obviously having lost quite a bit of weight in the past few months, being pulled out of the rubble of one of the Mulciber's houses that the Death Eaters had been using as a meeting point.

"As was Archibald Smith. Lucius Malfoy on the other hand..."

"He can't have gotten off." Sirius hadn't been directly involved in that case, but he remembered the confident set of Moody's jaw when he brought Moody in. That kind of confidence didn't come from a auror as seasoned– or paranoid– as Moody without very good cause.

"The Malfoy reputation didn't escape unscathed, and I have no doubt that far more of the Malfoy fortune was spent than Lucius would have liked, but he was never convicted of anything." Arctrurus's mouth was set in a hard line, and Sirius was not sure if it was because he was daring him to disagree or if the old man was actually upset that Malfoy had gotten off.

Sirius should probably have been upset, or at least angry. Instead he merely felt numb, much the way he had felt as Padfoot in Azkaban. He wondered idly, because he didn't have the energy for anything else, if changing into Padfoot would help with this or if he would just feel even more numb.

"Sirius!" It took a couple of seconds for Sirius to register that something was shaking his shoulder and another few seconds to realize that it was Arcturus. "Are you all right? Do you need to go back to the house?"

"I'm fine." Sirius forced a smile to prove it and grabbed another set of Regulus's robes. "Have you been checking the pockets? He might have left something in there." He would have had to slip it into his pocket after the robes had been laundered, because Regulus was the sort of neat freak who would never have dared hang dirty robes back up with the clean ones.

"Of course I've been checking in the pockets. How else would you hide something in a set of robes?"

"Hidden pockets." The response wasn't really that funny, but Sirius still found himself struggling to keep a straight face. It might have been embarrassing if Arcturus hadn't had an overly serious expression on his face, as though he were trying to work out what exactly separated hidden pockets from regular pockets.

Then Arcturus's eyes widened, just enough that Sirius knew he had thought of something unpleasant. He started feeling around the robes he was holding, one step short of frantically, as though he was actually afraid that he had missed some hidden pocket or another.

That was infinitely funnier than Sirius's attempt a a joke and he really couldn't keep himself from laughing at the sight.

Arcturus glared at him. "Regulus could have sewn hidden pockets into his robes. It would have made it easier for him to smuggle things around."

"Only if the Death Eaters were in the habit of searching each others' pockets," Sirius said. "I don't think that any of them would have been above going through Regulus's room if they thought he was up to something, or if they got bored, but pockets it a bit much."

"It would have shown too much distrust," Arcturus said. "But that doesn't mean Regulus never used hidden pockets."

"He had a secret drawer hidden inside a secret drawer," Sirius said. "I think that's plenty paranoid enough, don't you? Or is there no such thing as too paranoid for Slytherins?"

"Again with the Slytherins. This level of fixation is both childish and a little bit disturbing. People are going to think that all your time in Azkaban has twisted your brain." Arcturus's mouth twitched, caught for a second between grimace and smile, before settling into a an impassive line.

Sirius smiled back. "They might be right. After all, I have this childish loathing of Slytherins and I still live with you."


End file.
